I wonder weather Engineering colleges in Tamilnadu will survive for long, they are already falling and many have them have closed down or turned into arts and science colleges. The reason, well there are some which I wish to post here

The culture of looting

Engineering colleges, almost all of them were created not to impart education to the masses, but in a hope of looting people and escaping from taxes by creating a trust. Many families in India do not know what Engineering is and they blindly put their kid into one. In fact many of the so called engineers in India do not know what engineering is. Take any person who has studied engineering and put him in a company, he will falter.

All Engineering college does is to sells you is a myth. A piece of paper that is worthless, but you buy it for Rs 4 Lakhs or so. With that myth which says you are a certified engineer, you come to the real world and find out that you are not one.

In fact companies like mine employ these non engineers, give them money for free and give them real engineering tasks which the colleges have failed to do. And we find that the so called engineers are clueless and no idea how to complete them.

Prevention of foreign universities landing on India

India has been intelligent to allow foreign investment in I.T, but we don’t see foreign universities teaching kids and making them better professionals. Kapil Sibal wanted to bring in foreign universities and offer competition to Indian ones, but these corrupted lot here bribed various channels and stopped it.

Without competition, our universities have stagnated and are teaching outdated stuff, their collaboration with Industry is almost nil, and even if we in Industry go on to help them, those so called engineers are so so substandard that they become liability to a company than an asset.

We have missed an excellent opportunity of skill development because colleges and universities here have excellent bribing power.

Comeback of foreign universities

I was interviewing for my friends company, I wasn’t interested in what college they studied or what marks they got, but I was interested what work they had done before applying. Students of Indian colleges have done nothing but to WhatsApp their friends, but students who have got degrees from edx, Coursera, Udacity etc seems to have done work and you know it from their talk. So a situation is now arising where though denied opportunity, foreign universities are coming to us via the internet and are increasing our educational quality.

As a tech companies, we want people who can solve problems and work for us, rather than some one who says that “I own a piece of paper that says I am an Engineer”.

Do you need to be a Engineer?

Believe me, the work I do, if properly trained an 8th standard guy could do it. In today’s world you need not be a branded as rocket scientist to become a real one, there is so much on the internet that you can find out how to do stuff and train yourself quiet easily. Its a myth that you must be an engineer. Remember the first person who might have started an engineering college wouldn’t have been an engineering degree holder.

We @ IT companies are not really looking at people who do have engineering degree, but we are looking at people who can do our tech tasks. That’s it.

The Cost

Finally the cost. Should you need to pay Rs 4 Lakhs and invest 4 years to become an engineer if you can get a better degree with better training by investing just Rs 5000/- on an online degree and spending just 3 to 6 months? I hope you have common sense.

Now small companies are failing to recognize engineers, soon even huge gorillas too will feel the pressure and do the same.