BE Vs. B.Sc

Say the word "India" and the first that would come to people's mind all over the world is IT. For sure, IT boom has catapulted India's image from poor beggars capable of sleeping on a bed of nails or snake charmers who can also charm ropes, to smart, intelligent, adaptive, ambitious and most importantly, English speaking technologists and businessmen. In other words, India is a big talent pool, a large overseas market and hence a very fast growing economy. Its good to see India trying to take steps to maximise the opportunity it has got.

But I guess there are certain issues that are not yet addressed. No, I am not talking about the elimination of poverty or corruption. Those are oft discussed, but stagnant topics. I am talking about the educational stream Vs. career prospect lopsidedness.

If you are scratching your head about what I am talking about. Here is the scenario. Today, if one graduates out of any college (not necessarily a reputed one) as an engineer, he/she has a bright chances of landing in a decently paid job (More often than not, that job will be IT related). But, barring a very few exceptions, a science graduate has virtually no chance of getting placed anywhere. And I see only *one* reason to it. Service-oriented IT companies limit their technical workforce only to BE graduates. The notion among the companies' hiring team that a mechanical engineer from a not-so-great college will be a better fit than a B.Sc. CS graduate for a computer programming job is nothing more than superstition.

This creates an unequal distribution of job prospects across different educational fields. Having spent a few years of my lifetime in the US, (where else!) this is one clear difference that I have noticed between the two countries. Any educational qualification (even high school) has a sizable pool of jobs that one can land in and make both ends meet. (That explains the fact that a very low percentage of high school graduates go on to graduate with a Bachelors degree in the US). The question here, is "Will I ever get a job?", the question there "Will this qualification fetch me a job that will pay me well enough?".

To reach there, we should work on redistributing the educational qualification Vs. job-prospect mismatch. For starters, I would suggest that the IT service oriented companies start hiring from relevant science graduates (with say, CS, physics or math specialisation) for atleast some of their jobs. (After all, we are still doing more service than innovation). If my guesses are not way off, this might trigger a lot of other phenomenon. More high school graduates will consider science specialisation as a viable option (rather than paying huge capitation fees to engineering colleges). With more students from science colleges getting place in reputed firms, reputation and hence competition among institution will increase. This will in turn, lead to improvements in infrastructure.

On the other hand, with more people going for science field, a number of engineering colleges whose infrastructure is no more than rooms, will disappear allowing the universities to concentrate better on improving the quality of engineering education and infrastructure. Infrastructure improvement in engineering by itself is worth another blog. I hope to dedicate one for that in the near future. For now, its for you (sitting across the table) to put your thoughts OverTea!