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Personal musings. Views are my own.

The new brain drain

Check out this article in the New York Times. It talks about how the quality of college education in India is poor, and is churning out millions of students a year who can’t get jobs.

“But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India’s upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.

In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India’s 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.

Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.”

This is making light of a much more complicated problem in India. For the past several decades, jobs that India’s economy has been able to offer its college educated have not been as lucrative as jobs in Australia, Europe, and the States. That’s why my parents—an engineer and a nurse—left the country along with a whole slew of Indians just like them from the 60s and 70s on.