The Private Engineers: How the Govt. fooled our parents

You know, I liked science, I wanted to study it. I studied it. I got the Engineering degree although I don’t consider myself an engineer. I am currently in the Project dept. where I do simple numeric calculations on excel-sheets and write emails all day. That’s not science, at least, not for me. Even, the people in the Engineering dept. don’t do science. They just read about it in manuals.

I work in a company who sells electrical bulbs to people. We don’t manufacture electrical bulbs; we buy them. Our vendors who manufacture these bulbs also don’t manufacture these bulbs, they just assemble it. Most of the time, all the required parts for manufacturing the bulb are imported from China, especially the technical one which requires all the engineering, the chip.

So, what exactly is India’s countless private college educated Electronics and Electrical Engineers’ doing in companies like mine, you ask; they are doing simple numeric calculations on excel-sheets and writing emails all day.

And, please don’t take me wrong, it is not as if Indians are incapable of engineering and development. A sizeable no. of developers and engineers in the west are of Indian origin or Indian expats. It is that they got the opportunity to do something better with their careers and so they got out of here.

In the headline I said that the Govt. fooled my parents because after graduating from the 12^th standard in 2003 most of my classmates went on to study engineering. Some of them in public colleges like the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Center/State recognized government colleges, whereas, most of them, like me only got admission in the private college.

I can tell you about my college a bit more objectively now since it’s been nine years since I graduated. It was a waste. Sure, I made some life-long friends but that was on my time. The college which should have taught me engineering taught me to just mug-in all theory and formulas and see what I can score.

Some teachers tried to teach us but what could they have done when they had earned their degrees just from a college like ours.

And that is why, I am mad at how the Govt. fooled our parents. Yes, our parents because what good did we know at that age?

The Govt. told our parents that there is a huge scope of job prospects in engineering especially Computers and IT, except in 2003, when Electronics and Communication was all the rage and our parents bought it.

What really happened is that the Govt. gave private colleges which offered sub-standard premises and below average educators to have a free-run in handing out engineering degrees to non-suspecting students. The Govt.’s justification, ‘The world says India needs more engineers.’ The Govt.’s catch: ‘It means India needs more people with engineering degrees’. [1] & [2]

So what really happened when the privately-educated graduated from engineering colleges is that we had to study again to get to a level where we can get a job in the real world and most of my Electronics and Communication engineering (E.C.E.) classmates did get a job but just not in their field. 

After studying 4 years of E.C.E. engineering, my classmates were studying Computer programming languages. Why?

Just because, that’s where the jobs were and to get that job you just don’t have to compete with fellow E.C.E or Computer or IT graduates, you have to also compete with Mechanical, Electrical, Civil, Automobile, Biotechnology, Astronomical, Chemical, you name it graduates because the I.T. sector is where the decent paying jobs were, as the Non-IT job you would only fetch a privately-educated fresh engineer 50% of what an I.T. engineer draws.

And even in the I.T. companies in India, most of us were only doing the work which we would have learnt with a professional vocational diploma certificate by spending 50% time and 50% money less than what we spent in engineering.

For clarification, I got a job in a sector where my work was dictated by a subject which was one of the 40 subjects I cleared during college. 1 of 40!

My personal opinion is that the Govt. for their own vested interests just fooled our parents into letting their children waste their time and money on an engineering education based in a utopian world which was a complete mismatch from the required academic standards and the job prospects of the real world.   

References:

[1] http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/national-employability-report-on-engineering-graduates-net-java-hcl-technologies/1/248970.html

[2] https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-bitter-truths-about-engineering-in-India