In India, engineering students outsource their academic projects

The discussions on HN about the STEM shortage are laughable.

When I see the average HN-er complain in the thread on the recent (Latimes?) article which complained about how Liberal Arts degrees are letting people down, I feel that your nation has decided to strap lead weights and jump into the deep end.

STEM fetishization is Bad. its stupid, counter productive and creates a vastly toxic situation where now everyone has to go to college to get a STEM degree so that they can go on to become consultants.

If non-STEM inclined people start doing STEM, all you get is a huge demand for STEM and that follows with rising prices of premier institutions, dilution of degree value from anyone else and then a flood of McDonalds education institutions which prey on the weak.

On top of that it leads to unhealthy competition and student suicides as - well now you need to get great SAT scores before you count anywhere in the world.

I could go on, but I forget more points every time I remember one.

One of the things that you will realize was important once its gone, is people actually versed in history and softer study fields who can chime in discussions and provide things like good moral arguments.

If I asked someone here to defend free speech beyond the obvious first few feints and lunges, they'd fall.

1. It doesn't pay much. The people it employs are engineers who did not get jobs in software companies.

2. No. More often than not, students end up doing projects "suggested" by these project-making companies. They already have a bunch of "Student Database Management System" and "Hospital Record Management System" projects lying around which they rehash.

3. This already happens to an extent. People who work in these low paying jobs end up getting some experience and move onto better paying jobs. But like I said in (2) above, what they get to do are hardly any fun stuff

I think there is a fundamental flaw in your argument. You are complaining about the world and giving it a power to be your "selector". You are waiting for the world to select you. Businesses are businesses and like it or not they only care about their bottom line. It does not matter whether you have a degree or a high school drop out as long as you make them money. Its bad that you are waiting for someone else to recognize your talents or anyone else's. Take matters in your hands. Do anything but don't complain about the world. Its not going to change for YOU.

and frankly if someone is smart enough to play politics and get the business done by being a manager, why shouldn't they get rewarded ?

I am technically strong and loved every project I did in collage but I also recognize the value of business people and their marketing and sales skills. Learn from them and be good in business and engineering.

Actually this is what STEM fetishization gets you. Its a cautionary tale for what happens when you have nothing but STEM as the bar for worth and value.

Your STEM degree and then masters dictates how people perceive you, provide marriage offers, respect you and a huge swathe of other social niceties.

Its what creates our student suicides, competitions to place kids in a strategic school to jump start their STEM education.

Its the root for tution/cram classes that start 2 years before the final exam and absorb vacation and free time.

Its the cause of having a huge amount of useless engineering schools that just print out degrees after you pay a hefty fee.

Further you have non-STEM people doing STEM. They don't care about the subject and never will. For them slope is a pointless concept.

The teachers are over worked and have to correct a million different papers. On top of that since there is finally a national level test - so people just start teaching the test.

This generates tonnes of unmotivated rote learning. I've seen a student draw a circuit diagram, by starting at the lower left corner and sketch upwards to the right.

He may as well have been forging a picture from memmory.

Its frustrating.

With regards to disruption. I know of several pushes to disrupt the industry.

Someone I know is starting an extensive skillling course targeted at slums - the aim is to train plumbers, electricians and secretaries.

Education had also recently been the flavor of the month for investment purposes (I think early in the year). Right now I don't think thats so popular.

At the end of the day though, most of the education disruptions seem to ignore the lessons of education - namely that the fundamental unit of chaos in society is human beings.

Startups balk at this and then try to solve the easier problem of matching the requirements of an education board and their metrics of learning.

Well, I completely agree with kamaal's comments as well as the information presented in the article. In India, especially in engineering colleges, people are mostly interested and encouraged to somehow get HUGE GPAs and secure well paying jobs. The real calibre of these so called engineers are found when they go and work for non standard companies (read as not Wipro, TCS, Infosys, Tech Mahindra etc). I was educated by an interviewee that a IPv4 address is 256 bits by someone who claims to have 6 years of work experience as a Juniper Administrator.

The first thing which is taught in the "so called companies" (refer above) is to follow the process. They don't give a fuck about the outcome. Just follow the bloody process. And this idea is incorporated right in college. No one bothers to ask questions. And if someone does, then they get into the bad books of the teachers. I was failed in "Computer Networks" because I used a Soekris board + OpenBSD PF for implementing a firewall which was my third year project while everyone else had compiled a Linux distro with IPchains (remember IPChains and NOT IPTABLES and this was in 2003).

Now lets talk about employers. I had worked for 4 startups and 2 HUGE multinationals literally people are treated like slaves. They are expected to work 24/7. I am a Unix Administrator and I was expected to come to office 8 in the morning and leave at 1 in the night, that too after pleading with the manager to let me go. The reason I was made to work like a maniac was, I was the guy who understood the internals and others were merely sitting behind their desks.

The result? I threw in the towel and have decided to go for a MS. I do not intend to work for anyone in India ever again.