22 Lakh Students Suffer Due to Paper Leak = No Politician Resigned
2 Minutes Late = 3 Students Denied Entry to Set an Example of Discipline
Two Systems in India
Read Dead Redemption 2, I will remember you. What an experience, one of the best character arcs to date in the media (Arthur Morgan). It changed me as well.
The brickbats on my analysis of falling value of BTech degrees were expected. Here are my responses, questions and observation:
1. Are we ok for salaries not increasing over 15 years when the company profits multiple 8 times? Isnโt that profiteering from labour arbitrage?
2. Are we ok if cost of education quadruples over those years with no increase in income?
3. For a country trying for demographic dividend, are we ok if the EMIs last a decade which 20 years back required no loans?
4. If demand vs supply is justification, why donโt we increase the fees across all IITs or BITS to a crore? They still will have takers?
5. Even if TCS were to bring down the salary by half, they will find a million graduates seeking that job? Is that ok with you? In India, even for 62 peon/messenger posts, Total Applications were 93,000 of which 3,700 were PhD holders and 28,000 postgraduates. Demand vs supply?
6. Are we ok when ITES earns 30%, Educational institutes earn 34%, banks earn while student canโt have two square meals a day and pays an EMI for a decade?
It is ridiculous that we blame on students, about their skill sets and employability. We permitted the colleges. Ee licensed them. We set the curriculum. We set the assessment. We test them. We pass them. And when we fail in the promises that we made to them, of making them skilled and employable, we blame them. They passed an exam we set. We failed. They passed.
Lastly, While I do appreciate a bit of rationale, I was surprised that while I had every one arguing on behalf of big tech, there werenโt any arguing for the students and the cost inflation in education.
In Fahrenheit 451, the abolition of reading began with tech companies simplifying books into summaries that you could read in five minutes. Because people no longer engaged with the texts, they forgot how to think. Then came the book-burnings.