Shyamal Majumdar: The crisis in engineering education

Students everyone is chasing don't want to pursue engineering, while their counterparts in lower-rung institutes are stuck with dead-end jobs

The director of a top-rung engineering college asked his third-year students a simple question: Would they pursue a higher-level engineering course or opt for an engineering job? Ninety-five per cent of the students said they would choose neither. "I knew the majority would say no, but 95 per cent came as a huge surprise. The manufacturing sector has been a big no-no for some time, but it seems even information technology jobs are losing their attraction," the director says, as bright students tell him in private they don't want to do coding work for the rest of their lives.

To avoid engineering jobs, most students are either taking courses such as chartered financial analyst or preparing for management entrance exams to enter the consultancy or financial services sector, while treating their core engineering course as a part-time vocation from the second year itself. As a result, the average cumulative performance index has been dropping but nobody, except perhaps the teachers, seems to be bothered. Mind you, the institute the director heads is not one of the IITs (Indian Institute of Technology) where the situation could be even worse.

The director's concern finds echo in the corridors of some of the leading manufacturing companies in India. Larsen & Toubro Chairman A M Naik has been quite vocal about the fact that nobody wants to join an infrastructure company and that L&T has become a recruitment haven for others. The head of an automobile firm says his company has not been able to convince even one student from top engineering institutes (forget the IITs) to join in the last few years. He thus questions the current practice of subsidising education in the IITs. "The IITs attract the cream of our young men and women," he says. "The government has established the IITs and a large proportion of taxpayers' funds has gone into them. Perhaps, we could legitimately ask why their education should continue to be subsidised if the students keep on refusing to drive manufacturing enterprises in India."

Several of India's leading companies have no option but to reach out to lesser-known engineering institutes in tier three or four towns and invest hugely in training. That's actually a good thing, but the problem is that the jobs these students get often do no justice to their engineering degree. For example, the resume of an engineering graduate with four years of experience in an auto company says he has exposure to "making invoice and demonstrating vehicles to customers, including taking them for drives".

Also, the attrition rate is extraordinarily high as entry-level salary is pathetically low, and has stagnated at that level for the last eight-nine years. There are stories galore of software developers in Bengaluru, who work for as low as Rs 10,000 a month. Last year, 'The Logical Indian', a Facebook community which started its own website some time back, wrote about a mechanical engineer from a well-known college in Karnataka, who is driving an auto-rickshaw in New Delhi. He doesn't want to do an MTech for two reasons: One, who pays for his degree? and two, "even if I do an MTech, I would get Rs 25,000 as my initial salary. I'm getting the same now, so doing an MTech is meaningless".

These cases may be exceptions, but companies say this is bound to happen as the quality of students is abysmally poor. The number of engineering colleges has gone up from a not-too-modest 1,511 in 2006-07 to 3,345 in 2014-15. Andhra Pradesh alone has more than 700 colleges even though more than a third of the 1.5 million engineering students graduating every year run the risk of not getting a job at all.

The situation isn't too bright at the other end of the spectrum, too. An engineering graduate says in his blog that he has got a Master's degree in engineering from a prestigious institute and has worked in a Fortune 500 company as well as a mid-sized engineering firm, but has now "fallen completely out of love with engineering". "I look at older engineers and ask myself if I want to be like them in 10 or 15 years, and the answer is always, 'Hell no!'," he writes. "I don't believe it's just because I'm a younger engineer and thus lower on the totem pole; I've worked with many middle-aged engineers, who basically did the same work as me despite their seniority."

That's a huge headache for India's engineering education administrators.