What do the letters MBA or M/B E/Tech. mean? Are they passports to high paid jobs? During my corporate life I must have
interviewed over a thousand management and over two hundred engineering graduates
from across the country. I haven’t found
even one percent of them employable.
And, that 1%, why do they have to apply for commercial jobs in the
airline or freight forwarding industries?
India today has close to 4000 management colleges with over 3.5 lakh
seats and an even higher number of engineering colleges offering 15 lakh seats. We pride ourselves on having the greatest
pool of technical personnel in the world.
What exactly do these so-called engineers and managers amount to?
An MBA graduate I interviewed recently wasn’t able to frame even a
simple sentence at a written test I gave him.
When I queried him about how he passed his MBA, he said he never
understood a word the teacher said in class.
All he did was learn certain answers by rote and reproduce them at the
examination. He could neither speak nor
write in English. He read with great
difficulty a passage from a Std. VII text and wasn’t able to translate it into
Malayalam. Most of the peons I’d hired
over the years could express themselves better than he in English. Where does such a person get employed?
I have a group of engineering graduates in my logistics
class. I was trying to explain to the
class how an injection-moulded product is made.
I asked the class a question about how poly-ethylene granules are made
expecting the answer from the so called engineers. I must say I was extremely disappointed. Most of the class, including the BEs thought
that plastic was mined from the ground like copper or iron ore. A few who didn’t think didn’t even know what
mining was. I’m talking about a group of
university graduates wishing to make a career in international logistics.
In India as elsewhere, students enrol in colleges hoping to acquire
a good education and, after graduating, a good job, which offers handsome pays
and perks. Because of the demand for
engineering and management graduates there are many aspirants and there has
been a proliferation of institutions offering these streams. In addition, there are institutions offering
an integrated BE/Tech & MBA programme.
But, has this improved the educational levels?
The All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) chairman Mr.
SS Mantha told the Times of India (see TOI AUG 13, 2012) that “Colleges in
remote India and institutes of poor quality are not getting students. And for
colleges, there is just one key to attracting students: institutes need to be
top-of-the-line colleges. There is no payoff in running a bad college.” There have been several studies on this
subject and I’ve posted some of them in the blog. So what we see are MBAs and
engineering graduates not fit to be clerks.
After all what does it take to become and engineering or
management graduate? Mug up answers to
about a hundred questions. There are
question banks available for you.
Reproduce these and presto! You’ve can put a BTech or MBA after your
name. Lack of quality education has
resulted in there being an army of unemployable youth.
So, what are the remedies?
·
Many would suggest that we
limit the number of MBAs, but that would be a very politically unpopular
decision. But, raising the standard
ought not to be.
·
I think the BBA programme
should be abolished altogether. It doesn’t
make sense. Management and Law should be
PG disciplines
·
A person should have 3
years of mandatory industrial experience before s/he seeks a management degree
·
Every semester, for engineering
and management, should a compulsory 2 month internship period
·
At least 50% (I would
prefer 100%) of the faculty members in both engineering and management colleges
should have a minimum of 10 years industrial experience
·
Raise the salary levels of
instructors to industry standards to attract the best talent into teaching. Several management colleges have started this
practice and the results are very heartening
·
Consider a person’s
industrial experience akin to qualifications.
E.g. a person who’s been in a management position for 10 years should be
recognised as an MBA and allowed to teach in MBA programmes
·
Raise the level of teacher
training
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