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April 07, 2011 – Comments (3) | RELATED TICKERS: IFN , INXX , EPI
India Graduates Millions, but Too Few Are Fit to Hire - WSJ
I admit to only having time to scan this article. We can read it together tonight and chat about it then. You bring the coffee and I'll bring the gnosh.
I'm not surprised.
How often does anyone here get satisfactory customer service or technical support when calling and getting someone in India? My experiences have not gone well (assuming I can even understand them in the first place) and more often than not I find that I know more about the issue than they do.
Without coming to a conclusion themselves, the article authors did include enough facts to see what the problem is: state intervention in (oppression of) the free market in education:
Symptoms:
"corruption and low standards"
"curriculum in most places is outdated"
"half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level"
"labor shortage"
"I was not prepared at all to get a job"
Insight:
"knowledge is more than a stamp" (of government approval)
Causes:
"after decades of socialism, it failed to reform its heavily regulated education system"
"hampered by overbearing bureaucracy"
"Government keeps tuition low"
"keeps teacher salaries and budgets low"
Solution: the Private Free Market:
"To make himself more attractive to potential employers, he has enrolled in a five-month-long computer programming course run by NIIT."
"Wipro runs an even longer, 90-day training program "
"Tata has extended its internal training program. It puts fresh graduates through 72 days of training"
"he's now taking a course to improve his confidence, interviewing skills and spoken English"
In particular, put these facts together. Government keeps tuition artificially low, which raises demand by students. But it also keeps teacher salaries low (since low tuition cannot support paying teachers what they're worth), resulting in a shortage of competent teachers. This is not a free market. Both kinds of price controls cause shortages. With this high level of state intervention, failure and corruption are not at all surprising.
The solutions are students paying for their own education, and companies paying to train their own employees. Why would anyone think that any other arrangement could possibly work to begin with?
Is this really exclusive to India? Haven't we been hearing the same complaints from U.S. companies for years, namely that they're ending up stuck with college graduates who lack basic problem-solving skills?
Grade inflation combined with the "education for everyone" push have resulted in a lowering of standards, which has lowered the value of a degree, whether it's an American liberal arts degree or an Indian high-school diploma.
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