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Solving the great Indian education system puzzle
It was 17th of August, 1982, exactly 30 years ago today. I had arrived on 15th of August from India, my first time in the US, to attend Rutgers University for a PhD programme in computer science. The entry for the 17th of August in my personal diary reads:
Dear Diary:
S. showed me around the campus today. Went to the Hill Center for the Mathematical Sciences. Was introduced to Prof Y. He said, Oh, youre from IIT, from India. You must be very bright. The campus is beautiful. Weather is warm and humid.
I still remember the pride I felt at that enthusiastic spontaneous declaration. It took me many years to fully understand what that implied. Much of that pride wore off over the years as I began to realise the sorry state of the Indian education system. I believe that my journey of personal awakening to the reality of Indias economic distress began with that little incident.
As it happened, I quit the PhD programme after a couple of years with a masters degree and went to work for a high tech firm in the Silicon Valley. I did not know then that I would end up becoming an economist, motivated by my desire to know precisely why India was such a poor, underdeveloped country even though Indians were evidently not remarkably incompetent.
Like most Indians of my upbringing and socio-economic standing, I was fairly ignorant about the true nature of India. We, children of middle-class (and above) families, received a fairly basic education but it was not what I would call a liberal education. We did OK in terms of science and technology but were seriously handicapped in the humanities. Our understanding of history, economics and the other social sciences was abysmal. I did not know then but now I realise that the Indian education system was terrible and from all indications it is obvious that it has only deteriorated over time.
Whenever I make that claim to Indians here about the Indian education system, the most common reaction is predictably hostile. Thats totally wrong. See how successful Indians are in the US. They are from the Indian education system. Yes, indeed, Indians are astonishingly successful in the US which leads me to the reaction that I usually get when I tell Americans that the Indian education system is bad.
Generally speaking, Americans are convinced that the Indian education system must be excellent because the Indians they meet and work with are usually highly educated, skilled and intelligent. Thats a clear reflection of the system that produced them. When told that the Indian education system is actually quite pathetic, they react with surprise and puzzlement.
Reconciling the facts of a bad education system and what appears to be highly educated people from it is quite easy. It is called sample selection bias. What the Americans are seeing are not a random sample of the product of the Indian education system but rather a very unrepresentative sample from the population.
The IITs are held up as the high-water mark of the Indian education system. Admittedly they are better than the average Indian technical schools but even they dont make it to the list of top-ranked global institutions. They do produce quite few very successful people but nothing to write home about. At best the IITs can be called the Indian Selection Institutes they select around the top two per cent from a very large number of applicants who have spent years preparing for a brutally competitive entrance exam.
The IIT entrance exam does not test the suitability of an applicant to study a technical subject; all it does is to weed out over 98 per cent of the applicants. When you have the luxury of rejecting almost all of the applicants, what you are left with is the most motivated, the most diligent, the most ambitious of the lot. Whether or not you teach them anything or not, they will be successful in the narrow domain of technical specialisation.
The IITs and their graduates are not representative of the Indian system any more than the Indians in the US are representative of the Indian population in India. Indian universities have little to recommend them. Various reports suggest only one out of four graduates is even employable.
Why is the Indian education system so dysfunctional? The short answer is that it suffers from Government interference. Government controls hobble the system primarily by constraining the supply of quality education. This it does by not allowing free entry and investment in education.
By constraining the supply in face of increasingly high demand for education, the price goes up, the quality goes down and opens up avenues for corruption. The high price allows the Government to extract profits from the system directly through financial corruption and indirectly through rationing out the limited supply to favoured groups in exchange for their political support.
The great mystery of why India is not a developed country has many dysfunctional components and subsystems. Education is only one of them. Diverse as they are, they all share one feature: They all suffer from Government control. Wherever you find chronic, acute and persistent shortages electricity supply, railway seats, college seats, telephones, two-wheelers, or whatever you are guaranteed to find the Government hand at work. Without actively engineering them, shortages cannot be sustained because equilibrating forces arise within any free system that wipe out shortages. India suffers from what can be called PPP persistent planned poverty.
If the Government were to liberalise free it from the chains that bind it today the education system, Indias education system would be transformed to the point where the average Indian student would be someone who could rightfully be told, Oh you must be very good. Not just that, India would be on the road to success.
It was 17th of August, 1982, exactly 30 years ago today. I had arrived on 15th of August from India, my first time in the US, to attend Rutgers University for a PhD programme in computer science. The entry for the 17th of August in my personal diary reads:
Dear Diary:
S. showed me around the campus today. Went to the Hill Center for the Mathematical Sciences. Was introduced to Prof Y. He said, Oh, youre from IIT, from India. You must be very bright. The campus is beautiful. Weather is warm and humid.
I still remember the pride I felt at that enthusiastic spontaneous declaration. It took me many years to fully understand what that implied. Much of that pride wore off over the years as I began to realise the sorry state of the Indian education system. I believe that my journey of personal awakening to the reality of Indias economic distress began with that little incident.
As it happened, I quit the PhD programme after a couple of years with a masters degree and went to work for a high tech firm in the Silicon Valley. I did not know then that I would end up becoming an economist, motivated by my desire to know precisely why India was such a poor, underdeveloped country even though Indians were evidently not remarkably incompetent.
Like most Indians of my upbringing and socio-economic standing, I was fairly ignorant about the true nature of India. We, children of middle-class (and above) families, received a fairly basic education but it was not what I would call a liberal education. We did OK in terms of science and technology but were seriously handicapped in the humanities. Our understanding of history, economics and the other social sciences was abysmal. I did not know then but now I realise that the Indian education system was terrible and from all indications it is obvious that it has only deteriorated over time.
Whenever I make that claim to Indians here about the Indian education system, the most common reaction is predictably hostile. Thats totally wrong. See how successful Indians are in the US. They are from the Indian education system. Yes, indeed, Indians are astonishingly successful in the US which leads me to the reaction that I usually get when I tell Americans that the Indian education system is bad.
Generally speaking, Americans are convinced that the Indian education system must be excellent because the Indians they meet and work with are usually highly educated, skilled and intelligent. Thats a clear reflection of the system that produced them. When told that the Indian education system is actually quite pathetic, they react with surprise and puzzlement.
Reconciling the facts of a bad education system and what appears to be highly educated people from it is quite easy. It is called sample selection bias. What the Americans are seeing are not a random sample of the product of the Indian education system but rather a very unrepresentative sample from the population.
The IITs are held up as the high-water mark of the Indian education system. Admittedly they are better than the average Indian technical schools but even they dont make it to the list of top-ranked global institutions. They do produce quite few very successful people but nothing to write home about. At best the IITs can be called the Indian Selection Institutes they select around the top two per cent from a very large number of applicants who have spent years preparing for a brutally competitive entrance exam.
The IIT entrance exam does not test the suitability of an applicant to study a technical subject; all it does is to weed out over 98 per cent of the applicants. When you have the luxury of rejecting almost all of the applicants, what you are left with is the most motivated, the most diligent, the most ambitious of the lot. Whether or not you teach them anything or not, they will be successful in the narrow domain of technical specialisation.
The IITs and their graduates are not representative of the Indian system any more than the Indians in the US are representative of the Indian population in India. Indian universities have little to recommend them. Various reports suggest only one out of four graduates is even employable.
Why is the Indian education system so dysfunctional? The short answer is that it suffers from Government interference. Government controls hobble the system primarily by constraining the supply of quality education. This it does by not allowing free entry and investment in education.
By constraining the supply in face of increasingly high demand for education, the price goes up, the quality goes down and opens up avenues for corruption. The high price allows the Government to extract profits from the system directly through financial corruption and indirectly through rationing out the limited supply to favoured groups in exchange for their political support.
The great mystery of why India is not a developed country has many dysfunctional components and subsystems. Education is only one of them. Diverse as they are, they all share one feature: They all suffer from Government control. Wherever you find chronic, acute and persistent shortages electricity supply, railway seats, college seats, telephones, two-wheelers, or whatever you are guaranteed to find the Government hand at work. Without actively engineering them, shortages cannot be sustained because equilibrating forces arise within any free system that wipe out shortages. India suffers from what can be called PPP persistent planned poverty.
If the Government were to liberalise free it from the chains that bind it today the education system, Indias education system would be transformed to the point where the average Indian student would be someone who could rightfully be told, Oh you must be very good. Not just that, India would be on the road to success.
