Indian Students Compete for Plum Colleges | Hacker News Reader

Indian Students Compete for Plum Colleges

nytimes.com

34 pointstokenadult9 comments

just to preempt responses of the form "higher education is a rip-off, it's way better to just learn stuff on your own and start your own software start-up", keep in mind that we in developed countries (I can only speak for the U.S., but it might be true elsewhere too) have the privilege of living in a relatively wealthy and stable society where one can flourish without much formal education, with the right entrepreneurial determination (coupled with great luck, of course).

in the U.S., the income and lifestyle disparity between someone who went to a top-ranked college and someone without formal education might not be noticeable (controlling for cost-of-living), but just from anecdotal evidence, i've heard that in developing countries, there can be orders of magnitude differences ... life in the underclass can be pretty darn crappy. keeping this in mind might help people understand a bit better why youths and adults in these countries obsess so much over their test scores and admissions into universities.

It's also the fact that a good amount of people in not-as-developed countries (I speak for Turkey, at least) use the diploma as a hiring heuristic to a much larger extent. No diploma? You must have been a lazy bum. Graduated from a good college with the lowest grade in your class? You'll probably have a well paying job regardless. It's getting better though.

Thats a very insightful comment, especially for someone who doesn't stay in India :-)

Just to give an example, as to why its important to get really good scores in school and college. I and my (now) wife graduated from a reasonably well known college of engineering as classmates. I had decent marks so I got a job during campus placement. It was a good pay for a fresh grad from industry wide perspective. My wife didn't have the greatest scores (but the scores weren't too bad either). She didn't get a job for ~8 months. After that she did get a job in a tiny company (~5-10 people) that took her in as a trainee for zero pay. 3-4 months after working there, she could use that experience to get a job that paid her about USD 60 (INR 3000) per month, which is quite low (I pay my cook that much now a days for an hours work, this was about 10 years ago). And then over time she worked in different companies and is now has a good job with in a well know cellphone provided. As for me, I comfortably worked for about 8 years in different companies, following which I dabbled in a startup with an ex-colleague and now taking a breaking to work on a few hobby projects.

The point being, that in India, getting good scores required to having a comfortable life. There may be exceptions, but if you don't get a good score you will pretty much be struggling for the first few years irrespective of how good you are.

Bang on.

It's about having access to the things with which you'll be able control your destiny. As a hacker, I at least need access to these things: a good laptop, a high-speed internet connection, access to books, a little bit of extra money to attend local conferences/meetups, etc. Btw bootstrapping yourself is actually easiest if you're a computer hacker - imagine how hard it'll be if your passion is something else (maybe your dream is to build a kick-ass electric car).

In developed countries, you can get access to this bare minimum stuff even if you didn't go to college and you're doing some part-time work while pursuing your dream on the side. In USA, you can move to a cheap, small town and save significantly on rent while not compromising that much on quality of life (if you ignore things like access to awesome restaurants, great night-life, etc). In India, if you move to a rural area, first of all you've to face 5+ hours of power cuts, no (high-speed) internet, expect to walk around with buffaloes, goats on the street - you'll be completely cut off from the mainstream). So it's very important you go to the best colleges in the country and get hired by the best companies, so you don't have to worry about these basic necessities. Things are of course continuously changing - another 20 years and maybe the standards of living will catch up with the West.

Also if you don't go to college, then you can forget about visiting USA or anything other country ever. None of these countries will ever offer visas to people who haven't gone to college. This is not a problem if you were born American - the land of all great opportunities :-)

Spot on. The Diffrence a college degree can make when you are looking for your initial job is enormous.

if you do engineering from a Top rated college in India (IIT), the starting salary(Annual) would be 20,000 USD

if you do engineering from a Medium Rated college in India ,the starting salary(Annual) would be 10,000 USD

if you do engineering from a Low Rated college in India , the starting salary(Annual) would be 5,000 USD

all these cases, only if you have scored more than 65 or 70 % in the course. If you haven't, then majority of the big companies doesn't even consider your resume.

If you are really good, but with no degree, most of the companies won't take you in. The ones which do, would take you in as an intern with pay as low as 1000 USD/Annum. (Sometimes with no pay).

I have a cousin who is immensley talented on the networking side, but he has no engineering degree. it took him nearly 7 years to reach the initial pay of a person with an engineering degree.

"What is the purpose of educational institutions? Are we placement agencies or are we educational institutions?" he asks angrily when asked how the ISB, Hyderabad, will place its students given the grim global economic conditions.

http://getahead.rediff.com/slide-show/2009/jun/03/slide-show...

Exact same situation in Turkey. There are a lot of students but not enough universities. You are expected to take a 3 hour and 15 minute exam of diverse topics to determine a score which will determine whether you can apply to a certain department of a certain university. Then, you may get in depending on how many other people also applied to that department and how they scored compared to you. The end result is people saying "Oh, I couldn't make computer science, I guess I'll be a marine biologist." I think pretty much everyone unanimously agrees that it's dumb. It used to work 30 years ago when the number of university applicants was not even an eighth of the current number and the exam was reasonable. When more people started applying, the amount of universities didn't scale up and so they had to filter out more people, and the exam got progressively harder to the point of having trick questions to throw students off.

It happens on Brazil as well. It's common for people to take six-months courses to review all high-school contents before taking the entrance exam, and it's also common for them to fail at least once.

Depending on the college and graduation you want, you might be competing with other 15, 20 people for that spot.

But that happens mostly on the public colleges, that not only are free, but considered much better than the private ones. And then we get a cross: rich people can pay for the courses and go to the (free and better) public colleges, while poor people must join a (paid and worse) private college.

It's quite messed up.

(w.r.t engineering..) Unlike in US , where you have many universities of repute & cutting edge research - in India we have only the IITs or at the next level perhaps the NITs(with quite a level of difference).And with millions of kids longing for that coveted seat in the iit , we have cut throat competition.Coaching for entrance exams has been a thriving industry in India.

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