Indian Times report that 75% Indian engineering students unemployable
Nov 18, 2009,
NEW DELHI: Discussing a report by software industry group NASSCOM which says that 75 percent engineering students in India are unemployable, education experts here said that the Indian higher education system must improve its curricula to give skill building and practical training to give students a better advantage.
A.D. Sahasrabudhu, director of the College of Engineering, Pune said that one of the major reasons why engineers, even from reputed institutes, are not easily employed because they lack practical skill. He complained: "The focus in most universities here is always on academics and theory. Thus mechanical engineers may actually not know how to change a part of a machine because they never touch a machine; A software engineers may not know how to manage a project because they only know how to code. Therefore even if a high scoring student gets hired in a good company, that lack of practical knowledge will shows".
Sahasrabudhu said during a panel discussion at the Higher Education Summit organized by Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI). "From our experience we know that practical, hands-on training is very crucial in the education system and we must change" he added.
In their latest report released last week, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) said that currently most Indian IT companies reject 90 percent of college graduates and 75 percent of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained. The demand on producing more software people by government to meet global demand has created a fiasco with millions of unqualified and unemployed software engineers. Because there is such a lack of competent people, many IT companies opened their own universities and trained students based on their needs, companies like Infosys also increased its training of new hire employees to 29 weeks from this year. That's seven months of training, the report added.
Richard Kerly, a Scottish university professor, who had participated in the discussion said: "Just recently I came to know that Citi Bank had started its recruiting here, but they were not going to hire graduated students. The reason is that students here, although brilliant, don't have an edge when it comes to putting theories to practice."
Sudhir Matthew, Dean, Ecole Hoteliere Lavasa, Pune said: "The scene is very similar in the tourism industry. Lack of hands-on trained students have forced hotel chains like the Oberoi, Taj and ITC to open their own hotel schools where students are trained per their needs. Tourism grow at a rate of 8.8 percent in India, making it one of the fastest growing markets but there is a serious lack of skilled people to manage tourism activities and if no action is taken, tourists will go elsewhere. Practical training is therefore very important to meet this shortage which is estimated at 3.2 million jobs.
Because of poor and slow to change in existing education systems, the number of students from India enrolled in US universities passed 100,000 for the first time this year and today India has the highest number of student enrollments in America, despite the financial downturn trends. As the number of international students at universities in the US increased by 8% to 671,616 in the 2008-2009 academic year, students from India made up 103,260 of the overall number. China remained in second place with 98,235 this year. South Korea with 75,000 remained in third place.
The largest growth this year was seen in undergraduate enrollments, which increased by 11%, compared to a 2% increase in graduate enrollments. This growth was driven largely by increases in students from China, suggesting that increased affluence is enabling more Chinese to send their children to US for better education and better opportunities after they graduated. The top ten most popular fields of study for international students in the United States in 2008/09 were Business Management (21%l), Engineering (18%) Life Sciences (9%), Social Sciences (9%), Mathematics (8%), Health (5%), Fine Arts (5%), Intensive English Language (4%), Humanities (3%), Education (3%), and Agriculture (1%).
Sources
- Blogs of Prof. John Vu, Carnegie Mellon University
