India produces more engineers than America. One statistics say that India churns out at least 5 times as many engineers as the U.S. But that does not mean that the skills imparted to our engineers and the ones to their American counterparts are the same.
According to a 2012 National Employability Report of Aspiring Minds, an employee assessment service provider, about 83% of engineering graduates are unfit for employment. There are about 14 lakh engineering seats available for admissions in colleges across the country. Though India has many engineering colleges that provide world class education, most of them face “quality” issues. Often two fixed notions about engineering come in the way of providing quality in engineering education.
Notion 1: Engineering is just about engineering
Engineering education is not only about engineering. In other words, a person who only has engineering skills will not make a good engineer. Usually, curriculum of engineering colleges does not give enough importance to communication and interpersonal skills. Students practically get no exposure to organizational skills like working in a multi-disciplinary team or collaborating with a geographically distributed team having members from different cultures.
Notion 2: Engineer’s job is to follow rules
Engineering education may be about memorising facts, passing tests, and regurgitating information, and of course following the rules of the science. But engineering job demands students to think critically, try new things, fail and learn from their mistakes.
Industry does not need engineers. They need innovators. Employing organisations may hire top scorers but reward only the creative and the innovative.However, what happens at colleges? Do we teach students to prototype and pitch their ideas with professors? Do we get industry experts to mentor students and help them turn their concepts into realities? Do we encourage students to use open courseware, made available by dotcoms like Coursera and EdX, so that they can learn arts? Do we have business incubators to offer knowledge in management, and learn how to do business?
Engineering colleges should ponder over these two quality issues, if they want to play a meaningful role in higher education and employment generation.