The Future of IIT and Engineering: Why There’s Hope in the Darkness

Employers now do not share profits more than necessary. Employers pay what they need to attract the workers they need to make a profit. So why is he so high in non-core salaries for some of the IIT graduates?

The optimistic answer is that core engineering gives transferable skills. For example, Core Engineering teaches many subtopics, each containing different simplified assumptions, equations and approximations, models and applications, empirical truths supported by simple experiments, and attention to practicality. I’m here. Mathematics, by contrast, is essentially free from the world. Physics is more concerned with truth than function. Economics has no comparable controlled experiment (he cannot have two identical countries testing two different tax systems). and so on.
The pessimistic answer is that IIT entrance exams are just talent labels and IIT education is irrelevant for both students and non-core employers.

But the answer doesn’t matter. We need to look beyond the IIT. There are demographic waves in India. There are 25 million people in their 20s alone. Given its size, the IIT is small. Nationwide, AICTE accredits thousands of technical colleges. Many of these college graduates have been dismissed as “unemployable”. The real problem is much more serious. Even if these universities increase the employment of their graduates, employers are not enough. If 2 million people apply for 1 million jobs, salaries will go down. The unemployed will offer to work at lower wages, and employers will agree. For most universities, improving quality does not make business sense. For most students, studying more doesn’t change their career prospects.

Sadly, unemployment seems even harder for non-engineers. Only 300 million of India’s 140 million people report their salary income on their tax returns. UPSC alone is estimated to have nearly 1 million applicants for his 1,000 successes. Nationwide, a million person-years are spent competing for over 30,000 person-years worth of subsequent careers. It’s not hope, it’s despair.

Now let’s look beyond the nation.

First from China. After decades of repression, the youth population is relatively small and the number of women proportionately small. China’s population is currently spurring growth, but it will be 20 years before babies born today start working. In Western Europe, the population of some indigenous peoples is also declining. Brazil is big and has many good universities, but Brazilians mostly speak Portuguese.

Now let’s look at the United States. When I was a student, graduated international students were allowed a one-year “practical training” to get a job. This has allowed many to remain permanently. Currently, the practical training period for STEM graduates is her three years.

Have American students moved away from STEM? I’m afraid not. Enrollments for her four-year STEM degree at U.S. universities have steadily increased over the years. Many of those students must be Americans. So why extend a foreign STEM graduate’s internship to her three years?

That impetus has to come from the employer. This suggests that employers aren’t getting enough of her talented STEM graduates. why? Did American universities intentionally lower their standards? I hope not. The second possibility is more insidious. Outside funding advances careers in U.S. colleges and universities. Professors only work on funded research. Funding is shifting from core themes to newer themes such as AI (artificial intelligence) and ML (machine learning). Many once-respected professors of classical subjects now feel undervalued, even though they teach old courses that young teachers don’t attract. Young faculty are pursuing new-age themes and, frankly, learning the old well doesn’t pay off. A student I know who went to study mechanical engineering at a great US university turned to mathematics when he saw the engineering courses offered. I fear that commerce has undermined the once-strong discipline of America’s great universities.

Let me be clear that AI and ML are big advances. But there are countless people who are just using AI/ML software in mundane ways. I suspect these people have not learned the level of core engineering skills required by US industry. You can’t shift your thinking to AI while you’re in the dark about voltages, currents, electronics, metals, stresses, strains, forces, masses, and more. Not if you want to be a leader.

This brings me to my last point, one of hope. If the world’s wealthy keep the softer jobs, others will step in to grab the rest. The rest of the work is on both ends. At one end are sober low-wage jobs. The other end, I hope, is engineering.

Who will do the engineering? India may do it, as the number of Chinese is dwindling and English is scarce in Brazil. India’s next generation may aspire to core engineering as a challenging career plan.

Chatterjee is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Kanpur Institute of Technology and author of Build and Sustain a Career in Engineering (Notion Press).