Should we try to retain students going abroad for higher education

 Recently there were media reports pointing out that the top ranker in JEE Advanced has joined MIT (though still in India due to online classes). Stories have also come out that 4th ranker has joined UCLA. This caused the social media to react. Some of them criticizing them to leave India for US. I too poked my nose into it, and wrote on FaceBook that it was their personal choice and instead of worrying about 2 of them studying abroad, we should worry about more than 100,000 going abroad every year for under-graduate alone. Yes, every year, 100,000 students are going abroad for higher education, and the number is increasing every year.

I suggested that we can retain a lot of them in India if we could have high quality educational institutions in India. Since high quality institutions require a lot of expenditure, it is unrealistic to expect government to put in that kind of money. And, let us not forget, they have expanded IIT, NIT, AIIMS, IISER and other high quality institutions in the last decade, but government will have its limits. So, one will have to set these up in private sector, and that will happen only if the private sector can charge high tuition. And therefore, we must allow private sector to charge high tuition particularly when they have invested initial money and proven themselves to be of high quality. In particular, I suggested that a private institution with a similar NIRF rank as an average NIT should be able to charge about Rs. 5 lakhs per student per year, which is similar to the cost that is incurred at an NIT. (May be slightly less than that since it is assumed that private sector will be more efficient than government sector in managing expenses.) And a private sector institution having an NIRF ranking similar to an IIT, could charge Rs. 10 lakhs per student per year.

Why the number of students seeking foreign degrees increasing at a fast pace. I think as we integrate with global economy and more of us travel around, our aspirations are going up. As our economy becomes larger (ignoring covid related downturn in this trend), the ability to afford foreign education is going up. With ease of travel, ease of connectivity through video calls, and increasing numbers of Indian students on various campuses globally, the resistance to sending an 18 year old in foreign land is reducing. And as online education becomes mainstream, I suspect that many students in India will go for programs which allow him/her to spend may be 2 years in India at lower cost and 2 years on the campus abroad as that becomes easily affordable. So my prediction is that within 2 years of post-Covid times (say, 2023 Fall admission), there will be 200,000 Indians enrolled in foreign degrees (including those online from India).

Is this a good thing for India. An exodus because of poor quality of education cannot be a good thing for any country. Spending a massive 15 billion USD in foreign destinations instead of Indian campuses is depriving our economy of that much boost. Our economy desperately needs to reduce import and increase exports. And this is an avoidable import of service. Having high quality educational institutions in India would also attract foreign students (so we not only decrease import of service, but increase export of service). As these high quality institutions will not just be for these 1-2 lakh students, but for everyone else, we will also have a better trained manpower which is desperately needed by our industry. Many high tech companies are finding it difficult to recruit high quality personnel and the growth is slow because of that.

Seems like a win-win situation for everyone. And, of course, government has been talking about greater autonomy, including in setting up fees, attracting foreign students, becoming Vishwa Guru. The system of "Institutes of Excellence" and "Graded Autonomy" were started with these goals in mind.

But surprisingly, I found a lot of opposition to the idea. The arguments were primarily these:

1. These 100,000 are mostly going out because they want to emigrate and setting up high quality institutions in India would not stop them. A lot of them are any way low merit students (couldn't get high rank in JEE), and going to low quality institutions abroad. We shouldn't worry about them.

2. Even if somehow we can retain these 100,000 in India for the UG education, they will leave for jobs/higher education abroad. So our industry/society will not benefit from them. It is best they leave early, particularly the few meritorious ones in this group, because they would waste a good seat in India by leaving India after graduation.

3. High tuition will cause inequity. It is better to have everyone get poor quality education (except a few colleges like IITs which the government can afford to subsidize), than to have some colleges with poor quality education and some colleges with high quality education. The assumption here is that there can be no model of financing a high quality education in private sector, and hence private sector cannot be allowed to set up a high quality educational institution.

Let me answer these objections. The 2nd one is the easiest to handle. Would you want to have a car component factory in India if they are only exporting their products to a car manufacturer outside India. Of course, yes. Whatever economic activity we can do in India helps out economy. If a substantial portion of that 15 billion dollar can be spent in India, it is good for our economy.

As far as 1st objection is concerned, there is really no data. Everyone has different anecdotal experience. The argument that hardly anyone will stay back if there were high quality private institutions in India does not sound right because of my anecdotal experiences. When I talk to students at Ashoka University, for example, I do find many of them saying that they were considering universities abroad. Not only that, once we have something like Ashoka, we are able to attract a lot of foreign students. So even if only a few of these 100,000 will stay back in India, the high quality institutions will be good for economy by bringing in foreign students.

How about equity. I strongly believe that it is possible to come up with a model which allows people from financially weak families to study in expensive universities. For example, why can't and why shouldn't government say that anyone from a weak background will get a voucher to study and they can take that voucher to any of the good quality institutions, whether government or private. Already many of the schemes for SC/ST students allow studying in private institutions, we could extend that for EWS as well. So that pays for a significant part of the cost. The universities can get philanthropic funds to provide some scholarships. Some part of the cost can be taken care of through bank loans. There could be newer models like income sharing agreements. When we compare 100% poor quality versus 90% poor quality and 10% good quality, the latter is bad only if these 10% are all from privileged backgrounds and would cause the gap to only expand. But if we can find ways to ensure that there is representation of under-privileges students in this 10%, then it is definitely better for the country to have more well educated citizens.

Thankfully, despite the objections listed above, the government is going ahead with its policy to attract good quality private institutions even by allowing higher tuition. Some states have started allowing high quality institutions to charge high fees. And states which are rigid on this issue will not attract quality institutions and their residents will suffer. Remember quality institutions not only provide high quality education, but also do research, their alums tend to setup companies in the neighborhood of the college.

 

JEE Counseling in Covid era

 I have been receiving emails and phone calls ever since the results of JEE Mains were announced about three weeks ago. Some of them weren't going to take JEE Advanced and wanted to know where to apply. And some others were sure about their ranks in JEE Advanced and wanted to know where to apply. Each one of these parents (and never a student) would tell me that everyone gets a better rank in JEE Advanced compared with JEE Mains and there is a rule of thumb. If you had 2X as your rank in JEE Mains, your rank in JEE Advanced is likely to be around X. Go figure.

I would start off with my favorite statements. Don't think about placement. Think of your interest. And if you are normal and therefore, haven't found your passion yet, just get admission to the best college you can get into. Also, travel to a few institutes which you are considering seriously and talk to some faculty and students there.

But as I finished discussion with 20th parent (just two students so far), I have come to realize that Covid has changed the way we should consider choosing a college. And the change is not only about the inability to travel.

Till last year, if someone said that they are interested in Computer Science (and 90% people said that), one would quickly get into a discussion of Civil at an old IIT versus CS at a 2nd generation IIT, or Meta at an IIT versus CS at an NIT, and so on. I believe the discussion ought to be different today.

The concern in the recent past has really been this: I don't know my interest and you are telling me not to consider placement numbers. What if I just take admission in an unpopular discipline in an IIT, and then I don't like the discipline and I will be forced to change career through an MBA route. It was a serious enough concern. A 12th class student hardly knows about various disciplines and has no easy way to find out what s/he would like. So over the last decade or so, most progressive engineering institutes have been having a large number of electives in their curriculum, which could be used to do a "minor" program within your degree program. So if you were interested in CS, you could at least do 4-5 courses in CS. But that was not enough to gain sufficient confidence and sometimes even capability to compete with those who are doing may be 15 courses in Computer Science. And hence the minor programs ensured some relief, it wasn't enough. You needed another 3-4 courses to really get into that discipline.

This is where Covid has come as a savior. Today, the online education is more widely available, the quality has been improving, and most importantly, the market has started to appreciate online courses. So now, if you join an unpopular program, and you realize that this is not what you want, just do the minor program offered by the college in the discipline of your choice, and do an additional 3-4 courses online in the summer or even in parallel with your semester courses. With 7-9 courses, you have pretty much all the skills of that discipline that you need in the beginning of your career and you can keep learning on the job or online.

So earlier I would suggest that if you are interested in CS, study CS even if that meant taking admission in a somewhat "lesser" college. Now, I would suggest that you better be passionate about CS to take admission in a somewhat "lesser" college. The better strategy is to take admission in another discipline in the top college, do a minor in CS, do a few online courses in addition, and you are as good as anyone else.

This means that the most important question that you must ask is "how easy it is to do a minor in a popular discipline?" All IITs, I am sure, would proudly display on their website that they offer minors and lots of electives, flexibility in curriculum, etc. But is that flexibility for real. I know some CS departments would argue internally that if everyone were to be allowed a minor in CS, their teaching load would go up substantially. Why should they do this for students of other departments.  You shouldn't be joining these IITs if the goal was to keep the option of CS (or any other discipline) open.

So the ordering has been simplified, thanks to Covid. Order all IITs based on whatever criteria you like. Whether you prefer big city or small city, whether closer to home or away from home, whether your friends joined there last year or not, whether they already have most of the academic infrastructure built or not, and so on. Then those IITs where you have a strong chance of getting at least the least popular program, find out how much flexibility they have in curriculum. Specifically, do they have a minor program in all disciplines you might be interested in. Second, how many students graduated in 2020, and how many of them were able to do a popular minor like CS. If this ratio is small, remove that IIT from your list. And now, you can specify all the programs of the remaining IITs.

Are Engineering College Placements Correlated with Programs

This is a question that I have been thinking for a very long time. Why should average salaries for graduates of mechanical engineering, be higher than average salaries for graduates of, say, metallurgy. Is there something about mechanical engineering that market values more than metallurgical engineering. (I am just taking two random examples, nothing specific about them.) This would happen if the jobs that require the knowledge of mechanical engineers pay more than jobs that require the knowledge of metallurgy. Or if we consider non-core jobs which are common today, say, finance, somehow there is something that we teach in Mechanical that is indirectly useful for those non-core jobs.

Now, if you compare the salaries offered for core jobs (that is, jobs which require training of a specific engineering discipline), one notices that CS jobs often have higher salaries, may be some jobs in Electronics and Communication have higher salaries too, but after that the core jobs don't have too much variation across discipline. And we can't really think of skills that we impart to mechanical engineers that we don't impart in Metallurgical engineers but are useful for non-core jobs like finance. In fact, all these non-core companies don't seem to discriminate across disciplines. They typically have the same eligibility (in terms of CGPA) and the salary offers for selected candidates is same irrespective of discipline.

So, it would appear that there shouldn't be any significant difference in average salaries of different disciplines, except where the core jobs pay well and that happens in Computer Science and to some extent Electronics and Communication. But there is no denying that average salaries of various programs are different. For example, we at PEC recently announced the following average salaries (in lakhs) for those who graduated in 2020 with a BTech degree.

Computer Science: 14.6

Electronics & Comm: 11.7

Electrical: 9.1

Mechanical: 7.6

Production: 7.5

Aerospace: 6.9

Civil Engg.: 6.7

Metallurgy: 6.1

 

So we dug deeper into this, and this is what we found. The average CGPA of the graduating students also declined from Computer Science to Metallurgy. We then looked at the average salaries offered vis-a-vis their academic performance (as reflected through CGPA). And this is what we noticed:

 

9.0 - 9.5: 17.0

8.5 - 9.0: 11.3

8.0 - 8.5: 10.6

7.0 - 8.0: 8.9

6.0 - 7.0: 7.1

(Too few students in 9.5+ and <6.0 to be statistically significant)

 

One notices a much stronger linkage between CGPA and salary than between department and salary. if one sees the salary of folks with similar CGPA, the numbers are perhaps no longer statistically significant, but the spread is less (and again mostly due to CS/ECE) and students get similar salaries irrespective of their departments.

 

 This is, of course, on expected lines. As we started by saying that the difference between salaries should be either based on some core jobs paying higher, or non-core jobs valuing some part of training in some disciplines higher. With very few students outside CS/ECE taking up core jobs, there is no reason for salary differential.

So basically what is happening is that Mechanical students have higher average CGPA compared with Metallurgy and that is the primary reason for their better salaries, not their intrinsic mechanical training.

Why do they have higher average CGPA? A few things cause that to happen. One, the higher JEE rankers prefer Mechanical (in the mistaken belief that there is something about that training that gives better placement). That would put a small advantage in terms of CGPA (because the difference in the input quality is frankly not that diverse given that a few marks in JEE means a large difference in ranks). Second, the branch change based on their performance in first semester (or first year, as the case may be) ensures that those who perform really well in the less popular programs shift to more popular programs, and that really affects the average CGPA of a department. The third impact comes from motivation. People who join less popular programs are constantly nagged about it. They are told that they would have been better off if they had joined the more popular department in some other college. That demotivates them and causes reduction in their academic performance.

So the bottom line is that there is no statistically significant difference between the salaries offered to graduates of different engineering disciplines (except where core jobs are well paid and in plenty, which is currently true for CSE/ECE). The salary will depend on your performance in their test/interview, which will be impacted by how much you have learnt, your academic preparation. So, in this admission season, don't worry about discipline and join a good college.

No, it does not mean CGPA is the only thing in life. If you have done well in non-academic areas, you will still get a good job. But most people with poor CGPA also don't do well in other areas. So, please focus on learning and your interests (if any) and not worry about which degree will give you better salary.

Stop studying CS if you want to study CS

Strange title, isn't it? But this is exactly the advice my son, Udit, received from a lot of well wishers as he entered 11th class last year. If you want to study Computer Science at one of the top institutions in India, then you must not spend time on anything to do with Computer Science for the next two years. Just focus on Joint Entrance Examination. Just study Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics.

He had started JEE coaching last year soon after we shifted to Chandigarh, and he was doing extremely well. He was being advised that he can get a rank in top 100 which will allow him to study CS in IIT Bombay or IIT Delhi. But he had to give up programming. He was asking us, why should he give up computing if that is his passion and that is what he wants to study. And as a father (and even more as a Professor of Computer Science at an IIT), I had no answer. So he continued spending some time on programming, participating in some contests once in a while. Besides, we insisted that he spends about 1.5 hours a day on sports, exercise, and in general, keeping fit. My friends were aghast. Some even commented that I am jealous and am encouraging this so that he is not able to get a JEE rank better than what I got 4 decades ago.

This year, he represented India in the International Olympiad in Informatics. And he has brought a Silver Medal for himself and his nation.

While his performance is primarily because of his hardwork, perseverance and intense focus, we as parents can take some credit, at least to the extent that we didn't interfere. We didn't force him to spend all his time on JEE, but let him balance his passion, his school and JEE coaching. And frankly, we could do that because of our privileges. As an IIT Professor, we have good salary, and we can afford quality private education, including abroad. As someone in academia (that too in Computer Science), I knew that places like IIITD, IIITH, and CMI were better than most IITs. I also knew that there are enough people and more who study in next level institutions and do extremely well in their lives. Hence we could tell him not to worry too much about JEE. The important question that the educationists in India need to ask is how many students in our schools can follow their passion, the way Udit could.

This achievement enables him to seek admission in a lot of top institutions around the world. In India too, two institutes have normally given admission to top programmers like him. They are Chennai Mathematical Institute, and International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad. Another institute makes it very easy for such students to get admission. Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi will provide him a benefit of about 20,000 ranks (2 percentile) in JEE Mains.

India has been an average performer in IOI, which is not bad, but considering the size of the country and the fact that we have aspirations to be the center of the world as far as IT and software business is concerned, being average is not good enough. But if every school going student will be advised not to do programming, we aren't going to do much better.

This lack of programming culture is not restricted to schools. It also reflects in our engineering graduates. Less than 2 percent of IT graduates (those whose bread and butter for four years should have been programming) can write functionally correct and efficient code as per a survey by Aspiring Mind in 2018. All IT services companies have extensive training programs for fresh college graduates, sometimes lasting as long as 6 months. Besides learning how to code has the side effect of learning problem solving skills, learning how to organize your thoughts and express them logically, very important skills for the career. And we tell all our school going students not to indulge in programming as it will reduce their chance of studying Computer Science in a good institute.

Not surprisingly, our most passionate programmers join CS programs outside India. In the last 10 years (2011-2020), there are 16 medal winners who have joined college. Where have they joined: Five in MIT, Two in NUS Singapore, Two in IIIT Hyderabad, and one each in CMU, Stanford, USC Los Angeles, Drexel Univ, Univ of Waterloo, CMI Chennai and IIT Bombay. Most, if not all, of 15 students who did not join an IIT did so because they did not take JEE or did not have a good enough JEE rank to join IITs at Bombay/Delhi/Kanpur, etc.

We have two options. We can either label them as lacking merit and feel good that people are using MIT as a backup for an IIT. Or we can look back at their trajectory and see if despite their not studying at IITs, how have they done in life. And if they have done well in life then may be grudgingly admit that Indian institutions missed some really good students. So over the last weekend I searched for all medal winners right from 2002 Olympiad, and searched for them in social media, and google. And I found out that many have done PhDs from top universities and are working on cutting edge technologies mostly in industry (Google seems to have many of them), but some in academia as well. So, I would believe that IITs and other top institutions in India would have been enriched by their presence.

Last time, I talked about it was in a newspaper article a few days ago. And I was told on social media that competitive programming creates bad programming habits. I know my son had to study a lot of Maths early on to be successful in competitive programming. He understands complexity, has studied several advanced data structures, algorithmic paradigms, and what not. When faced with this criticism of competitive programming, he decided to check for himself how useful he will be in real life. He joined a startup for an internship in class 8th, and the founder told me that Udit was productive within a couple of days. He may be special, but I think criticism of Competitive Programming is hugely exaggerated. And what is the alternative people are suggesting to CP. Well, don't do any programming. Just study Physics, Chemistry and Maths, or just study for board exam in programming. Give me a break.

In school, currently, one is forced to take a huge bet. When you start spending time on programming, you know that if you reach top 4 of the country and then win a medal in IOI, you can easily get admission in a top foreign university. If you reach top 30, you can get admission in CMI, IIIT Hyderabad, or IIIT Delhi. But what if you don't reach top 30 in the country. You have not prepared well for JEE and you have nowhere to go. To really encourage students to follow their passion in programming, one will have to ensure that top programmers have access to quality CS programs, not just top 30, but top 300 to begin with (roughly the number shortlisted for Indian National Olympiad in Informatics). You will immediately see the change in coding culture in India. And I am convinced that if school children start doing programming (not for board marks but for something that the world trusts) India would truly become a global hub for software industry (not just services, but applications, and also new technologies like AI, Robotics, IoT, etc.).

When India started participating in IOI, there were even fewer school students interested in programming. At that time, Chennai Mathematical Institute (CMI) played a very major role in giving a push to programming. Not only they offered to hold training camps, their faculty would be the local organizers, and the leader of Indian team in the competition, but they offered admission to everyone who is in top 30. If you look at what did medal winners do in early 2000s, a large number of them joined CMI. They were telling school students, go ahead and follow your passion. If you do well, we will admit you. Now, we need to increase the numbers by an order of magnitude, if not two orders of magnitude. What CMI did in early 2000s, a lot more institutions need to do now.

I hope a day will come when in India, no student will be told that if they wanted to study Computer Science, they would have to stop spending any time on programming.

Why should you (not) do MTech

 The admission to MTech programs to all CFTIs just finished. And, I am wondering if all the excitement of getting admission is really worth it.

Two months ago, I wrote a blog about why some of the Tier 2 institutes should consider closing some of their MTech programs. The argument was that every institute should always review each of its programs for their success, and if a program is not successful, it should be closed and the resources can be invested in either another better, more topical Masters program or increasing seats in other popular programs. And I would like to look at the output of MTech programs in the following ways: How many students publish their research work in decent venues? How many of them go for PhD? How many of them get jobs which are specialized and where BTech would not have been preferred? How many of them get jobs which a BTech can do but with significantly higher compensation? If you are able to attract a large enough group of student (anything less than 40 is very inefficient use of faculty resource) with good GATE score, and a majority (say 60%) of them do well in terms of criteria of research/jobs/PhD stated above, then that program is worth the investments. Otherwise, we must think of something new.

Of course, if we were to insist on this criteria, then a very large number of MTech programs will close in the country, which is probably good because this shows that most of the students and employers do not value Master's degrees, at least not the ones on offer at this time.

While it may not make sense for a college to offer MTech program, does it make sense for a student to take admission in an MTech program. Actually, the two questions are linked. And if it makes sense for a college to offer MTech program, it would make sense for some students to join that program.

Why should someone join an MTech program. Obviously, they should be looking at this as furthering their career in some ways.

Are they interested in research, and are just testing the waters by doing a small thesis and if they like it will go for PhD. Hardly. Not only the number of students going on to do PhD is tiny, even publications in decent venues are too few. In fact, I wonder whether they looked at the research output of the department before applying for admission.

Are they looking for learning new knowledge and skills that somehow they couldn't get in their under-graduate programs. I guess a whole lot of students are hoping for this and think that this additional learning will help them in their careers. And indeed, I have myself talked about this to encourage students to go for higher education in the past. But things have changed in the last 10 years, and Covid is going to strengthen the impact of those changes.

What has changed is the availability of online learning with higher quality than in the past. So much so that often the online learning from the best teachers in the world is better than in-class learning from faculty of our tier 2 institutions. Also, online learning allows you just-in-time learning, that is, learn those things that you know you will need in the next one year or so. You don't have to take off for 2 years. And what is also happening is that today when you switch jobs, they are increasingly putting a value on your experience, performance and knowledge and not whether you have a Master's degree or not. And this trend of valuing knowledge and skills over a formal master's degree will only be strengthened post Covid.

If we look at what is happening in US, Masters programs in technology areas are attracting a lot of foreign students who are doing them for the reason of ease of immigration. If we consider US residents, a large number of them are moving to online programs.

What this means is that if you have got admission to a top quality program, then you may prefer MTech from there, but otherwise, joining a job and learning on the side through online medium, is a much better option for career progression today. It is already starting to happen with lots of students from good institutions who earlier would aspire to do MTech at IITs don't take GATE.

For example, if you think learning about AI/ML would be useful in your career, do a few courses on those topics online (or if someone offers evening/weekend classes in your vicinity, go there). May be just a short-term course organized by your company is going to be good enough. After a couple of year, you may feel that learning about economics will help you in your career. Well, go and take a couple of courses on that, and so on. You will need to have life long learning and doing a master's degree will have limited benefit.

A lot of students believe that the placement improvement that they would have after two years of MTech in a better branded institute would be so substantial that it is worth spending those two year. I frankly, don't see that, at least not when you go to any place other than the top programs. Two years' experience would invariably give you higher increment than an MTech from a good enough college, and remember you are losing two years' salary too while doing an MTech.

My belief is that students who do MTech from Tier 2 institutions do it because they look at the investment at zero. They will get a stipend which is good enough to take care of all costs, including tuition. They don't consider the lost wages for these two years in their cost-benefit analysis. And hence, even a small increase in placement package makes them happy. Obviously, not counting lost wages as cost is erroneous. In fact, if institutions increase the tuition so that the stipend is not good enough to take care of all costs, one would immediately see a significant decline in MTech students, not because parents couldn't afford a small cost compared with the under-graduate cost that they have already borne, not because getting bank loans is more difficult, but because the cost-benefit analysis will now show that it is no longer worth it.

At the end, I would still encourage students to take GATE. I continue to believe that it is not too difficult to get a 600-700 score in GATE which is good enough to get admission in a top quality department in the country. Gaining experience from a top ranked department would be useful beyond learning. But for most people MTech is a poor investment and it makes sense only when you don't put in two year's salary into the cost-benefit equation.

JEE (Mains) 2020: Spread it over 10 weeks

Admission to all CFTIs (like IITs, NITs, etc.) and a large number of other engineering colleges take place based on performance in JEE Mains or JEE Advanced (for which candidates are selected based on JEE Mains). So unless JEE Mains is held, we will not be able to have admissions in engineering colleges. Even other colleges which take admission on the basis of 12th class or state level exams would see a lot of students leaving when eventually admissions to CFTIs and other tier 2 institutions take place.

JEE Mains is held twice a year - in January and in April in normal years, and the better of the two performances is used for admission purposes. This year, due to Covid, April exams were cancelled, and it was announced that they may be held in June. However, in May, they announced that it will be held in July. And then again in July, they were postponed to September. And now, there is a demand by a large number of students that it be further postponed. On the other hand, there are many who want to get it over with. The uncertainty is causing a lot of stress to students.

I am trying to understand the arguments on both sides.

Those in favor of the exam being conducted in September are arguing that we have to learn to live with Covid, the life has to go on as close to normal as possible, uncertainty is causing a lot of stress, there is no reason to believe that the situation will not be worse after two months, and that if it keeps getting postponed, we will have to cancel admission entirely this year which will affect the career of a lot of students.

Those who want a further postponement of the exam are saying that situation is much worse now than it was when the exams were last postponed, that a few exams that have been held the SOPs were not followed, that the danger of a large number of people catching Covid is very high, and then there are practical issues like the number of exam centers being limited and hence some people having to travel hundreds of KMs to reach their center with no public transport, and no hotels open to stay overnight, etc.

A lot of these arguments don't make sense to me. That situation is worse today than it was when the exams were postponed is, frankly, a stupid argument. Because this argument is essentially saying that JEE Mains (and any other exams, including those in schools/colleges) should not be held for the next several YEARs. Why consider July postponement, why not March postponement. And real situation is likely to remain worse than March, 2020, for many years. But we shouldn't compare with the situation in March, 2020, since we are learning a lot about the disease, and today we have allowed a lot more things to happen than what was allowed in March, as a result of that knowledge. So, no comparisons with the past is valid.

On the other hand, an insistence on "life has to go on" by people who have all the privileges in the world seems cruel, to say the least. One has to take reasonable precautions in the middle of pandemic.

So the argument has to be something on the lines: Yes, there is a risk. Let us see how we can minimize this risk, and then see whether that minimal risk is worth taking given the rewards. Neither side is talking in these terms. (I find most debates in India are like this: One side only pointing to costs, the other side only pointing to benefits, and no one doing a cost-benefit analysis. And this debate is no different.)

What is the reward in this. Of course, admission to engineering programs and not having to cancel the year. As many engineering colleges have pointed out, they do not have enough infrastructure to admit twice as many students next year, if admissions this year are cancelled and hence it will not simply be a postponement, but cancellation or at least a serious reduction in opportunities for students. Let us take that on its face value though I think that this may not be true for all colleges. What is the latest by which admission has to be done. Well, for now, most of these colleges are thinking of admitting 2020 batch in the next semester which starts around Christmas time. And the loss of one semester to be compensated by working in one summer term, some reduction in curriculum, some overload in a semester, etc.

I think the colleges can postpone the admission by another 2 months, have the next semester take away part or full summer term and let these students use the summer term of 2024 instead for doing credits. So the argument of colleges that they can't afford to have 5 batches simultaneously on campus can be taken care of even if admissions are further postponed by two more months.

Of course, the question will be whether it will help. What if the condition continues to be grave. What is the cost we are willing to pay for this. On the cost side, one really needs to consider the probability of getting Covid (and protestors are wrong about seeking a guarantee that no one will suffer from Covid - there are no guarantees) and whether this chance is increasing or decreasing over the next two months, and a connected question is what is the cost of getting sick with Covid, now and after two months. If the probability of getting infection is such that a handful of people are going to get it and these handful are likely to come out of it eventually, we take that chance. On the other hand, if there is a chance that an exam might become a super spreader event, then we better not take that chance. How do we determine this. Well, what has been our experience in conducting other exams where a single center had 200-300 candidates, including many from far off places. Did they become super-spreading events. Of course, one side will point out that they did not become super-spreading events. The other side will point out that it was a matter of chance, since no one followed SOPs and are not likely to follow SOPs in JEE either.

But one thing that encourages me to be on the side of postponement is that the rate of growth of total numbers as well active cases has slowed down and the current predictions are, for the first time since we started having Covid cases, that we might be reaching a peak within a month or so. For first time, people are talking about rapid testing, vaccine being just 2 months away, many more drugs seem to be helpful in treating cases, the average hospital stay for cases has reduced, etc. As of today, the active cases are 7.1 lakh, and they were half of this 37 days ago, the slowest doubling till date. Similarly, the total number of cases are 31 lakhs, and they were half of this a little over 25 days ago, again the slowest doubling till date. (But I am still not going to suggest postponement, I have a different solution at the end.)

So, if I can summarize everything said so far, I think the risk of Covid has to be taken because the cost of canceling admission for the entire year is too high. However, it seems to me that we can use summer term of 2024 instead of summer term 2021 for this batch, and hence there is still time for admissions to be delayed and there appears to be some chance that Covid situation just might improve further in two months. And hence I would be slightly in favor of postponement.

But there is another argument that we have not taken into account yet. And that is the lack of transport and hotels. While most of the students live in cities (where the centers are) or within a small radius so that they can reach the center on the day of the exam, there are still a lot of students whose center is 100-300 KM away (and a few cases where they could not get their close by choices and have been given a far off center). With public transportation severely restricted in many parts of the country, reaching the center in time may not be easy. Remember that the candidate has to enter exam center by 08:30 AM. Give a bit of margin and it is clear that if you are dependent on public transport, you better reach the city a day in advance. But with hotels closed in most cities, or requiring a negative Covid report or having other restrictions, it won't be easy. And this is adding to the cost and stress as well. I think the logistics for an individual are quite daunting.

When I add the logistics to the earlier discussion on progression of disease over the next two months and possibility of delay in admission, I become more firm that we need to postpone JEE Mains. (But not by two months, keep reading for an alternative.)

Also, it may be noted that the monsoon season will cause disruptions in different parts of the country at different times. That Covid issue also will be more or less serious in different parts of the country at different times. So a uniform date is unlikely to be acceptable or even fair to everyone. 

Is there an alternative?

Yes, indeed, there is an alternative. NTA has 10 sets of question papers, and they are organizing 10 sessions of JEE over 6 days, two sessions per day. And they assign random session to each candidate. We can do things differently.

Instead of completing the exam in one week, what if we do that over 10 weeks. Every week, one lakh  or so students can register for the exam. So those who feel safe in their neighborhood now can take exam now, and those who think that a few weeks down would be better for them, they can take the exam a few weeks later. So those who are arguing for a delay of 2 months, can have a delay of 2 months.

Of course, what happens if a lot of students want to take exams 2 months later. The capacity of online centers is limited, particularly now with Covid precautions, distancing, etc. And what if the transport and stay restrictions are same two months from now. Well, the solution is that the 10th exam (and even 9th, if need be) would not be online, but will use OMR sheets. There is enough time for NTA to print enough copies of the papers. With offline exam, you can have centers in remote areas. You can ensure that there is at least one center in each district or 2-3 centers in each large district. Basically, if you ensure that people don't have to travel long distances, the number of candidates at each center is small, then the probability of infection is reduced tremendously.

Also, the session should be 2-5PM so that students can travel in the morning, reach the center, and go back the same evening, without requiring a place of stay in the city of center.

We could further announce that those students who have registered for JEE Mains and decide not to take the exam will be allowed to take JEE Mains 2021 even if this was under normal course their last chance.

We could further ask IITs to take admission based on JEE Mains this year, which will save us 4 weeks in the admission process. They could compensate by having a much more liberal branch change rules for this batch.

By the way, I am aware of the need for randomization of slots for JEE Mains for proper normalization. But I think given the pandemic situation, if the "merit" is not uniformly distributed in all 10 sessions, it would still be ok compared with the alternatives.

Governance in our universities

A few years ago, IIT Kanpur conferred its Distinguished Alumnus Award to Dr. Pramath Raj Sinha, who has been an institution builder, having been associated with ISB and Ashoka University and many other initiatives and institutions. In a public lecture, next day, he was asked for the secret of his success. How come all the institutions he is associated with are doing so well. And his answer was that the most important element in success of an educational institution is its governance structure. Of course, faculty, infrastructure, curriculum, research, and so many other things make up for an excellent institution, but good governance makes all these things happen, and good governance is more likely to happen when there is a good governance structure.

And the problem in most of our institutions is that their governance structure is weak. The number of board members who owe their membership to connections in the government is large. Self perpetuating boards are almost non-existent (perhaps, IIIT Delhi is the only exception in the government sector). The chairperson is usually a political appointee (not usually a politician, but still). Thankfully, it is becoming increasingly common to have some faculty representation in the board.

Even when there are non-government nominees, they are either ex-officio, or decided by the government. So if you are enlightened enough to have an alumni representation in the board, it will be either ex-officio (let us put President of Alumni Association in the board), or let the government decide which alumni. Why can't the board decide who will be the alumni for the next term.

The governance structure within the institution is no better. One either has extremely rigid structures (like every Head has to be through seniority and one can not consider leadership, passion, vision, etc.), or there is no structure at all and a Director/VC can appoint anyone in a dictatorial style.

The selection of Director itself is seriously flawed. Often that process takes a few minutes of interaction. How can the two sides understand each other in a few minutes.

To make matters worse, there are no red lines around any entity. If an employee has a grievance, the email will be sent to board members and they will even oblige by asking the institute questions about that grievance. It is common to interfere in the internal functioning of the institute. Ideally, there should be very clear distribution of responsibilities for various committees and one should not interfere in the functioning of the other. On the other extreme, since the roles are not well defined, some people in leadership positions just refuse to take any decisions, like Heads and Deans will seek approvals from Director/VC for the smallest of things. You can't be nimble in such a setup.

Further, the concept of conflict of interest is not understood at all in our committees. This is such a serious problem that may be one day I will write a full blog article about it.

And we continue to perpetuate the poor governance models. Anyone from IIT system, for example, can tell you that the success of IITs is due to multiple factors, including resources, autonomy, etc., and an extremely important reason is its governance structure. And yet, new institutes keep coming up with other poorer governance models. UGC will even ask institutes as to why they are following IIT model of governance and not the older university model.

Thankfully, some of the newer institutions like Ashoka University are showing the way forward with a much better governance structure and as Dr. Pramath Sinha said that is one of the important factors for its success.

How do we improve governance in educational institutions. It is perhaps possible to change the legal structures, the composition of boards, the selection process of Directors and Vice Chancellors, etc., but it would be very difficult to change the culture. But we must start one day. Remember the corporate governance in Indian companies was considered quite poor just 25 years ago. If we start improving governance in education, in a couple of decades we will be at par with the rest of the world.

What do I want in campus placement data

Every year, educational institutions are going to make certain claims about jobs that their graduates have secured, and more often than not, the data will give no real picture to anyone (and surprisingly, even the students about whom this data is will certify on social media that this data is correct, when it is not).

The placement data is the most important parameter in the minds of potential students and parents. It is also a fairly important parameter for NIRF ranking and accreditation. And that gives a huge incentive to institutions to fudge this data, at least in ways in which they can claim that they weren't lying (if data were to leak out). And if some do it, it puts additional pressure on those who wouldn't have done it otherwise. But speaking truth will hurt them disproportionately.

Most institutions will give a couple of numbers: What fraction of students received jobs, and what were the highest and average salary packages.

How are they fudged. The fraction of students receiving jobs is often calculated over their most popular programs only. So in an engineering college, it would be only for BTech program and would not consider MTech students whose placements are typically poorer. Second thing that would happen is that it would be calculated over "eligible students" and not over all graduating students. Different institutions would have different definitions of "eligible." Some would consider those eligible who have a CGPA of higher than a certain threshold (since very poor CGPA students would find it difficult to get a job, so why include them in the announced data). Similarly, some would exclude those with a few fail grades. Some may consider only those who have applied for at least N jobs. (Apparently those who apply for very few jobs and not succeed in them are not really serious in placement. Why should we consider them in our data and reduce our numbers.) But, hey, if you are giving someone a degree, shouldn't you consider him ready to take up a job. Or is it that your degree has no value in the job market.

There is more. Suppose there are 100 eligible students. 70 students get one job offer each. And 10 students get two job offers. So 80 students get 90 offers. Most institutions will call it 90 percent placement, hiding the minor detail that it was impossible for a student to give his/her job away to some other student.

And then we come to packages. Here, the companies will fudge. We will shout at them, but then in our statistics, we will use their fudged numbers. So the maximum possible bonus value which very few employees are likely to get will be added to salary component. The initial joining expenses/reimbursements will be added. The value of shares which you can sell only if you stay on for 5 years will be added (and not even divided by 5). And so on. So the maximum will be higher than what truly will be the income of the graduate. Finally, we will talk about average and not median which is a better indicator of spread in this case. We will do that since average is always higher than median when it comes to placement packages. A few top packages will skew the average.

What would I like to see as a parent of potential student. Ideally nothing. I would only like to check the credentials of faculty before choosing the place to study. But, that is not the answer anyone is satisfied with. So here is the next piece of information I would like to see.

Let us first talk about BTech program. How many of your recent graduates got a job, or admission to a higher degree program, or joined a family business, or started a company of their own. Basically, what fraction of your graduates are doing something meaningful (and I personally don't consider dropping a year to study GATE as meaningful, your mileage may vary). When it comes to a job, I would only consider jobs which are about double of minimum wages plus yearly interest on the cost of degree. So, if the cost of the program was 10 lakhs, and considering that today's minimum wages are about Rs. 12,500 per month, I would only consider jobs which pay about Rs. 35,000 per month or Rs. 4 lakhs a year. (twice of 12.5 K, and 10K per month of interest payment).

When it comes to MTech program, the cost of the program is rather small, since one gets a decent stipend every month, which takes care of a significant part of the cost. But still, if you had a loan from your BTech program, that would have accumulated more interest, and you have 2 additional years. So the expectation should be at least 5 lakhs a year. (Notice, the assumption is that one got a stipend, didn't spend much more than stipend on the education. If these assumptions do not hold for a particular program, then I would only consider jobs of higher remuneration for those programs.)

And similarly for PhD program, I would consider only those jobs which give more than 7-8 lakhs.

Now, will a university tell me what fraction of all their graduates are doing a job with certain minimum compensation, or higher studies, or family business, or startup (include anything else which is a reasonable outcome of education).

The universities won't do that. And their reluctance is not only due to fear of losing competitive advantage, but also internal.

As I wrote in my previous blog, a consistently poor performance of a program would raise questions about its possible closure. No one wants to do that. So it is best that such information is hidden from everyone. In fact, in terms of jobs, we can add one more information. How many of those jobs were in technical areas, and how many of them were in non-technical areas. Now, we should be able to review all programs. Consider a program with 50 students. If only a couple of students go for technical jobs, and another couple of them for technical higher education, while may be another 20-30 get sales/marketing/finance jobs or go for MBA, should we continue with this program, or transfer these seats to a popular program so that more of our students can follow their passion.

Having quality data easily available would help both potential students/parents on one side and the decision makers on the other. But a unilateral declaration by one college would hurt that college in admissions.

How do we go about ensuring that a large enough set of colleges give out quality data in the same year. Or alternately, everyone at least describe their methodology, whom they include/exclude, for example. How do we ensure this.

Why should we (not) run an MTech Program

One of the constant refrains of educational institutions is that they don't get enough funding. And indeed, if you look at the public funding of higher education, it is much lower than other countries at the same level of development. But, are we spending the money efficiently. Is taxpayer getting the bang for the buck.

And, the answer, unfortunately, is No.

One of the problems in our setup is that once a program starts, it is very difficult to close it. Also, there is never a review of programs from the perspective of their growth or closure. Indeed, even when we start a new program, there is often insufficient due diligence.

For example, why do our institutions run MTech programs. Are they cost effective. Can we spend the same amount of money for better social benefit elsewhere.

In my discussion with many educators, I have come up with the following reasons to have MTech programs:

1. It is a research program. We are not able to attract enough PhD students. So they form the backbone of our research efforts.
2. We are producing super specialists in areas where there is a significant industry demand. Under-graduate programs are more broad based but industry needs people with more depth.
3. It is a profit making program, which allows me to subsidize either research or UG tuition.
4. We cannot admit a large number of students in our 4-year program. So we admit some more in a 2-year program to give them an exposure to quality education that they will otherwise not get.

And, of course, it could be a combination of these reasons. (And, if you think we should run an MTech program for any other reason, feel free to put that in a comment below.)

Now, whatever are the arguments for any particular program, we should have data to support that argument.

Is it a research program. How many research papers of a reasonable quality have come out of thesis work. In places where PhD is the primary research manpower, one sees anything between 0.5 and 1.0 papers per PhD student per year. So a PhD student who takes 5 years to complete the program will publish at least 2-3 papers, and in many cases 5 papers or even more (including some which will get published after the PhD is over). If MTech is the primary research manpower, is it fair to expect 0.1 papers per MTech student per year (which basically means that out of 5 MTech students, there should be one decent paper over their 2 year period). If you are not getting even this much, then your MTech program is not a research program.

If you are producing quality manpower for industry, how is your placement of MTech programs. Are your MTech students getting placed in companies where their technical skills will be useful (or they are going for PhD). Are those companies valuing their skills to the extent that they offer them a higher compensation package than your BTech students. So, if you are able to place 50 percent of your graduates in jobs that will use those technical skills, and which pay at least 10 percent higher than your BTech median salaries, I think it is ok for you to claim that you are running an MTech program to satisfy an industry need. And if industry is really so keen, you should be running your MTech program with a batchsize of 40-60 students, and not 10-15 students. You are not serving the society by graduating a tiny set of students.

If it is a profit making program, then of course, no other argument is needed. But the program can be profit making only if you don't have specialized labs, you are recruiting part-time or contractual faculty at low wages. Are you telling all this to students before they seek admission.

If you are doing a favor by admitting students who missed getting admission 4 years ago, and they have now proven that they are worthy of studying in your institution, then again, what they do after graduation should be better than your BTech students. (In terms of jobs, higher education, entrepreneurship, and so on.) Is that happening.

In most of our MTech programs, we really can't argue on any of these lines, and yet we have a large number of MTech programs. Remember, that unless you are running MTech with part-time/guest/low wage faculty, it is a very expensive program, because the class sizes are typically much smaller. It often needs specialized labs which only a few students will use. The thesis work requires much more expensive faculty time and if it is not resulting in research publications, the return on investment is rather low, and we probably should increase the BTech seats instead.

But often there is no evaluation of any program, and once a program starts, it continues for a long time. And so, our very expensive MTech programs continue for pretty much no reason at all. My suggestion is that everyone should look at what MTech graduates are doing: quality of jobs, publications, enrolling for PhD, etc. Each public institution should clearly and publicly articulate when will the program be allowed to continue and when will it be closed. For example, they may say, we will close it if the total number of students admitted is less than 10-15 for two consecutive years. We will close it if less than 50% of graduates in a batch get job with salary higher than BTech median or get admission in a higher ranked college or whatever else. And if the output is not sufficient, close that program.

The same resources can be used for a better program. In fact, not closing current programs is a major reason for the inability to start better programs.

Grade Inflation

If you are a teacher, whether in a school or a university, ask yourself a simple question: The marks/grades received by your students, do they truly reflect the level of learning of that subject.

I have asked this question to a lot of people in many colleges, and not surprisingly, the answer has been in the negative. If you are an affiliated college, do most students getting close to 100 percent marks a reflection on their level of learning. Nobody would argue in positive there. If you are a university, does everyone getting an "A" grade in final year project reflect the quality of projects done at your university. (Simple test: Would you put up the project report online in a publicly accessible site for all projects who have been awarded an "A" grade?)

And yet, when one raises the issue of grade inflation, the attackers are ready. Anyone talking of grade is giving too much importance to evaluation, and not learning. Evaluation leads to stress and reduced learning. I am going to argue here that having an honest grading would actually support learning.

Another argument one hears is that since everyone does grade inflation, if we don't do it, our students will suffer during placement, which is something that I disagree with.

In an ideal world, we would all have great teachers who have this wonderful command of their subjects, have a great ability to motivate students to learn their respective subjects, and all our students come to college only to learn new things. We probably won't even need evaluations in an ideal world.

In real world, the faculty members mostly know their stuff, but are not able to impress students with their performance in the class. And students have the innate capability to learn those topics, but have been told by their seniors that only a few courses need to be learnt for placement, which can be done in 2 months before the placement season. Yes, CGPA is somewhat important because many companies will do shortlisting based on CGPA. So just worry about a respectable grade, and ignore learning. That can be done, as I said above, in 2 months.

So, in the real world, the only handle a good enough faculty has to "encourage" a good enough student to learn is a grade. Note that some students would learn despite faculty. And some faculty would be able to motivate students despite evaluations. But those are outliers and not the mainstream. And if the only handle you got is a grade, then not using that handle is not just dereliction of duty, but a criminal waste of national resources.

The fear that honest grading will lead to poor placement is far fetched. In fact, opposite will happen. If you insist on hard work, most students will deliver on that and will learn better. You can actually do an experiment. In the final year BTech Project, just give an "Incomplete" grade to a few students and tell them that they are given 15 days to present again. And now notice the amount of hard work they do in those 15 days. It would be absolutely remarkable. After that hard work, in any interview, they will be able to answer any question about their project and will sail through easily.

We should also look at the placement data more carefully. Among the popular jobs, how many students would not have been shortlisted if their CGPA was less by 0.2 or 0.3, and how many of those eventually got those jobs. The number could be non-zero, but will not be large, particularly for technical jobs. And if their technical skills were strong, many more of those shortlisted would have got the job.

A few years ago, I collected data on grades of graduating batch from several institutions. It turned out that the top institutions who are famous for their quality of teaching learning processes had a median graduating CGPA around 7.3. Those which were like just behind had median graduating CGPA around 7.5. And our typical Tier 2 institutions were around 7.9 or 8.0. So it seems that higher the grade inflation, the lower is the placement.

Easy grading is a strong disincentive to learn in the context of Indian institutions, and frankly, it is done not because faculty is concerned about the career of the students, or about comparative grading practices of competing institutions, but mostly because faculty members do not wish to work hard on proper exams and proper grading. As I said above, most faculty members are aware that they are being dishonest in grading. And students are only too happy.

Covid 19: PEC announces next semester to be online

Right from the beginning of this pandemic, Punjab Engineering College Chandigarh has been thinking ahead and figuring out the way forward during the pandemic time. More than a month ago, we had felt that opening the campus with all 3300 students would not be possible till November, and we must plan for an online semester. We had a virtual open house meeting with all faculty members where we sought their opinions on how we could conduct an online semester. Those suggestions were collated, discussed further with Heads of Departments from operational/administrative perspective and a final proposal was taken to Senate, which approved the same yesterday.

I am writing about it here so that other institutions who are yet to take a decision may benefit from our thought process. Of course, it must be kept in mind that each institution has its own context and its own constraints. And hence one cannot copy another institutions' formula and implement it as it is.

While a lot of faculty members feel that on-campus education is of higher quality, the problem was that there is no clarity on when we could start online classes. We could have postponed the semester by a few weeks if there was a reasonable assurance that we would be able to open the campus fully in due course. But if we have no assurance, and our own reading of the situation tells us that a fully open campus may not be possible till November (perhaps next year), there is really no point in waiting. We must start our semester at the usual time, which is last week of July, and it will have to be in online mode.

Modes of online courses:

We first defined how online courses could be conducted, and we figured that three models would be appropriate for us, besides a mixed model. They are:

1. Online – External: In this mode, the department announces an external course to be equivalent to a course in our curriculum. Students register for the course with the external agency/platform. These platforms include Swayam, Coursera, edX, Harappa, etc. Note that some platforms offer shorter courses, and therefore, the department may declare a set of 2-3 courses to be equivalent to a PEC course, and the student would have to register for those 2-3 courses. As an aside, UGC and AICTE are pushing for this model in Covid times. They encourage that 20 percent of all curriculum be covered through such courses where the external platform gives a certificate and the institution allows that course under its credit-transfer policy. There is also a possibility that they may increase this limit to 40 percent. We were earlier thinking of considering this mode with credit transfer (that is, the students will only get credit towards graduation requirement, but not any specific grade, and therefore will not count towards computation of CGPA). However, the final Senate decision requires that in courses conducted in this mode, the departments would still carry out an end-semester exam for all those who have received the passing certificate from the platform. And a letter grade will be assigned to the students based on that exam.
2. Flipped Classroom Model: Like the previous mode, the department will find one or more courses as equivalent to a PEC course. However, there is a local instructor, who expects the students to have gone through the material prescribed. And then the instructor will conduct a weekly tutorial or doubt clearing session. The instructor will also give assignments, quizzes, and other forms of evaluations, including mid-semester and end-semester exams. This is likely to emerge as the most common mode of delivering online education.
3. Online – Internal: In this mode, the instructor takes all lectures oneself and takes continuous evaluation throughout the semester. Instructor may use a combination of technologies to deliver online education. These could include recorded lectures or live streaming of lectures. In case of recorded lectures, there would be live sessions for doubt clearing. Lectures could be recorded using webcam of the PC, or could be a usual lecture but in an empty classroom, or a Powerpoint presentation with a voice over. In case of a lecture in the classroom, we can even ensure that there are a couple of token students in such classes given that half our students are from Chandigarh.
4. And finally, there can be mixed models, doing some topics through online – internal model, and other topics through a flipped classroom model.

Since our faculty members will be delivering the online education for the first time, we wanted to make sure that they have enough time to learn new techniques and conduct the course at the same time. And hence the course load needs to reduce. We will offer less courses this semester than what we usually offer, and in particular, expect most courses with small registration to be offered using Online - External model in which only exams will be conducted by PEC for grading purposes.

There will also be training of faculty members in online teaching and learning processes, both in terms of technologies to be used as well as the pedagogy to be used. Also, we will be procuring licenses of any software specifically needed and is not available free.

To minimize the number of courses to be offered, we are asking the departments to allow MTech electives to be offered as electives to BTech students as well. The incoming 4th year batch would not have the option of minor or specializations. Of course, they can use the period to do such courses from various online platforms and build strong credentials in whatever area they are passionate about.

We are also reducing the number of courses to be registered by 3rd semester and 5th semester students by one. We believe that students anyway have additional stress of online, and if we can reduce their load by one course which they can do in a future semester (our curriculum has very low load in the 4th year), that would help tremendously. Each department will decide which course can be postponed. This decision will be taken based on whether a course is per-requisite to many future courses, and whether the course is difficult to teach in an online fashion (many complex lab experiments, say).

We have several common courses across all MTech programs. They are in AI/ML, IoT, Maths, etc. These courses are offered by multiple instructors. They are short courses (fractional credits). We are asking the departments to coordinate and find appropriate online courses and offer them in Online-External mode, with one instructor responsible for final exam and grading.

We are also asking all the departments that for major and minor project courses as well as MTech projects, they should consider assigning projects which can have software component, designing, simulation, and other such components which can be more easily done while staying at home.

The labs are an issue in many courses. We are asking each department to look at the virtual labs site and see what all is available that can be used in our courses. Alternatively, there is a hope against hope that we will be allowed to bring in a couple of hundred students at a time to the campus during the semester. If that happens then students come to campus by rotation, and finish their labs in a small period of time. If nothing else works, we will go with just the live demonstrations of labs being video recorded and shared with students.

For the conduct of exams, the current hope is that we would be able to bring in all students to campus in November for on-campus exams. But we will need to conduct mid-semester exams and it is possible that we may have to conduct even final exams online. Also, we will need to conduct many quizzes and other evaluations online. So a committee has been formed to look into technology support for online exams. I may add that in a recent video conferencing session by Coursera CEO with several vice chancellors of India, they had mentioned that if we get into their "Coursera for Campus" program, it would be possible for an instructor to author exams and conduct it with online proctoring and plagiarism check, etc.

In any online education strategy, the most difficult aspect is to take care of students who do not have Internet access at home. We are working with multiple strategies to deal with this. First, if there are Internet cafes or Common Service Centers (CSC) nearby, students can go there to get access to online lectures. We will be making sure that all synchronous learning, exams, tutorials, etc., are as per a schedule announced by the Institute. This will enable the students to plan when to go to a place with Internet access. This, of course, would not satisfy everyone. Some students who belong to financially weak backgrounds and are getting fee waivers from the Institute can get an additional financial support to pay for Internet access (if payment was the only issue, and Internet access was otherwise available). Lastly, we will allow such students to come back to campus and stay in our hostels. We are hoping that 10% of our students can stay back in the hostels due to these reasons and the government guidelines would permit that. These students can use our computing resources as well as Internet access for their online lectures and other materials.

There is a plan to have a lot of online activities by all student clubs and technical societies. They should not feel that the online semester is only for studies. The extra curricular activities should be even more than what we normally have in a semester. And we have the experience. Our students ran a super-active calendar of online activities after we closed the campus in March.

The placement activities will be completely online. We really don't have a choice here as no company wants to travel at this time for campus recruitment, and it fits in very well with our plan for an online semester. Any training of students for placement activities will also be conducted online.

Mental health issues are becoming more serious when we have so much anxiety and uncertainty. To provide support for our students at home, we are looking at options for providers of counseling online and the system will be in place before the semester starts.

The MTech admissions are being done jointly with all NITs, and they are expected to join in the last week of August. The BTech admissions are being done through joint counseling with all NITs and IITs, and as per current schedule expected to join around 1st October. So we will have to plan something special for freshly admitted students in terms of joining online, etc.

There are many other parts of the overall plan, but the plan is also evolving, and we will keep relooking at all our decisions as we know more about the progress of the disease.

Indeed, one of the problems of planning in these uncertain times is that by the time you reach a consensus, the situation on the ground has changed. I remember that when we started planning for the next semester 5 weeks ago, the assumption we started with was that we can bring in about 10% of our students in hostel in August, 20% in September, 30% in October and 40% in November which is our normal state (about 60% students stay off campus). But in these five weeks, we are not so sure of bringing everyone back on campus in November, and indeed, my personal proposal today would be to plan for an entire year to be online for residential institutions.

We would be happy to receive any suggestions from any of you.

Foreign Universities may enter India virtually

Why do a lot of people go abroad for higher education. There are many reasons, and I say them in no specific order.

1. If you have any skills other than doing well in exams, you may not manage admission in any good university in India (and there are only a handful of them). And in such a situation, if you can afford to study abroad, you would go out.

2. Even if you are skilled in taking exams, you may be unlucky on that one day, and you may not get admission in any of the Tier 1 institutions. So you consider studying abroad (typically next year).

3. You want to emigrate to a country where you think you will lead a more comfortable life. Indeed, this is a common reason as the number of students to a country varies drastically as they change their immigration policies.

4. You want to study a subject not so popular in India, or a combination that is not available in India.

What is clear is that students or families have to be either very rich or they have to take loans and to repay those loans you need to be able to work in that country after your graduation. Some universities do have need-blind admissions, and they do provide some scholarships to enable students from places like India to study, but such scholarships are very few, particularly at the under-graduate level.

The online degrees are slowly changing that. Now, there is an option for Indian students to study "abroad" at a lower cost and even if one takes loans for those costs, the loan can be repaid with Indian salaries. However, before Covid, an online degree, particularly at the UG level, was not in demand. There were student doing Masters online, but a UG degree sitting at home is considered low-quality, both from the perspective of poor learning of academic content (no peer learning, no direct contact with professor, etc), as well as from the perspective of lack of campus life (sports, other extra-curricular, learning about different cultures).

But Covid is changing those perceptions and business models. With all the US universities forced to teach online for half a semester, the online education no longer appears to be poor quality. If MITs and Stanfords of the world can teach online, even as an emergency measure, there must be something good about it. (Actually, they have been teaching online for a long time. They have been live telecasting their classes, and/or recording their lectures and making them available for later viewing.)

But what about the campus life. And this too is about to happen. Campus life within your country while you study online from a far away university.

The universities abroad are facing a problem. They offered admission to international students, but can't let them join in the coming semester. Either the university is not opening up and plans to have an online semester, or even if they open, there are going to be travel and other restrictions because of which the student cannot join. They can offer a deferred admission to the student, but they fear that the student may look for other options.

So one of the ideas on the table is this: Contact a good university in the country from where you have admitted many students. Have a deal with them that they will host your students for a semester only for the campus experience. So they stay in the hostel, eat in the mess, use all the sports facilities, sit in the library, use WiFi network, and interact with so many other students around them. The education will be completely online directly from the foreign university. (May be they can have a deal to use some labs too, or the deal may include proctoring exams.) Not exactly the experience these students were looking for, but better than learning from home or doing nothing for a semester or two.

And if this idea works, that is, if the students like this model, this can quickly gain a lot of traction. And that would enable a large scale virtual-entry of foreign universities in India. That is, they can have a large number of Indian students, do all the academic activities online, and hence have no physical presence in India. So no regulatory hurdles. No need for any permissions. And some enterprising campuses offer "campus support" within India. These could be campuses of existing institutions who could build more hostels. Or these could be campuses of institutions that are closing down. They would be happy to have such a business opportunity.

The foreign universities, particularly those, who are beginning to offer online degree programs, would welcome such a combination as it allows them to increase the admissions substantially while retaining their focus on education and not having to worry about campus services.

What is happening is unbundling of university services as I mentioned in my previous blog and that is making these new options available to students. Students may not want to be on the same campus for all 8 semesters. They may want to spend a semester or two in the university campus abroad. They may want to work for some semester(s) while studying online. All those combinations can be served easily in the unbundled world.

Is this a good thing for the country, or should we be concerned.

My take is that we should be concerned. If such a degree takes root in the popular imagination, and industry accepts these graduates (which is likely, industry will only worry about your skills and knowledge), the numbers could be large. If 50,000 additional students (over and above those who are going abroad today) take up these programs, it would impact quality of admissions in our Tier 2 institutions. Our Tier 1 institutions will not see any impact in foreseeable future as face to face classes in top colleges (that too at hugely subsidized tuition) will continue to be preferred over online education.

Unbundling of Higher Education

Before I start, let me make it clear that I am only stating what I am sensing as unbundling of higher education. Any such transformation will have positive and negative impacts, and the impact will depend on the context. As of now, I don't understand in what contexts, what kind of unbundling may be positive or negative. With these, let us begin.

30 years ago, who would have believed that an airline ticket would not include some refreshments, some luggage being checked in, and a few other services. But over a period of time, we have seen the "extras" being stripped off and sold separately. Can the same thing happen to university education. What would it be like to have an unbundled university.

A university is arguably the most complex entity in terms of the range of services it provides. Besides delivering education (which as we will see below is itself a bundled service), doing research, providing consultancy to industry, it provides student residences, food services, additionally runs cafes and restaurants, reading rooms, libraries, entertainment options, a large sports system, transport, medical care, counseling, guest houses/hotels, placement services, and so on. In India, they may even have a full township with residential colonies for faculty and staff, with all municipal functions being carried out by the university.

Why does a university provide so many complex services and not focus on its core strengths. Why should it not ask the students to rent an apartment outside the campus, and live on their own. Why would it not ask the students to depend on medical care available in the city. Every such service can be justified by saying that it helps improve learning. If a lot of students live together and eat together, they will interact with each other and more peer-to-peer learning will take place. If students don't have to go far for medical help, they can spend more time on studies, will have less stress, etc. But surely, some of these services add lesser value at higher cost. Why shouldn't a university look at each service as how much does it cost, and how much it adds to the quality of education. Or at the very least, unbundle the charges, and give flexibility to students to pay for some services and not for the other. Of course, all universities have unbundled residential and food services. But all other services are part of tuition or compulsory fees.

The universities do this bundling for a couple of reasons. One is to ensure that they tightly control the quality of every related service. Further, bundling allows a service provider to increase charges by an amount higher than the cost of that incremental service (but only if the service provider has some market control,which the top ranked universities do). On the other hand, when we look at government supported universities, often the argument is that if the university will not provide all the services in a subsidized bundle, the poor will not be able to afford it.

But things are changing. Even if we look at the most basic function of a university - providing education - that itself is facing unbundling. If you look at online service providers, for example, the basic service of learning a course through online recorded lectures and a bunch of exercises, completely computer based and no human intervention, could come to you for free or at a very low cost. You want a certificate of successful completion. Well, they will throw in some limited form of evaluation, usually computer graded, some limited form of identity check (just taking a picture before the exam and password for logging in), charge you extra for it, and you get the certificate. Even our own Swayam, charges Rs. 1000 for the evaluation, while learning is free. You prefer interaction with other students and teaching assistants, you can pay a bit more for that access. You prefer that the certificate is signed not just by the platform but by a university, you go through some additional exams, this time proctored online through some AI based software, and you pay more. You want access to the faculty for some synchronous sessions, contact him/her during some "office hours",you further pay more. So, even the most basic function of a university is being unbundled with the result that the learning is available to everyone free or at a very low cost.

Unbundling in education is happening in other ways as well. A lot of students in US are doing basic courses at a community college who provide education without any bells and whistles at a very low cost, and then transfer those credits to regular universities, thereby spending less number of semesters at regular universities thereby reducing costs.

Online education is causing unbundling in other interesting ways. Can we unbundle campus services. Can I be a student of a university in US, but use campus services provided by some other entity in India. So I would register for all courses in the US university, obviously all lectures online, submit assignments, and have all academic activities being directly provided by this US university. But I need campus services. I want to interact with other students face to face. I want sports, culture, entertainment. I want the experience of living in a hostel. Can I check into a campus who will provide me all this for a cost. Believe it or not, it is starting to happen. I can then choose which "campus" to stay in which semester. May be some semesters, I will save cost and stay at home itself. Universities can then have some relationships with these providers of "campus" services, and see if they can also provide some academic support like labs, or face to face advising, etc.

Other forms of unbundling are more obvious. Do I need to seek admission for a "degree" program or can I just seek to do an odd course or a few courses. Again, online courses are allowing for such unbundling easily. In an on-campus face to face classes, it was too much of an overhead to have an "admission" process for just one course. If employers have an independent way of judging my skills and knowledge and I don't need a university degree for getting their attention, it will result in more and more people doing a few courses from diverse places and collecting course-wise certificates rather than a degree. Universities must consider this as an opportunity and not a threat, since this also encourages older people coming back to university for courses to upgrade their knowledge and skills.

I foresee that in future, even for a degree program, a university may not have any content of its own, or any other infrastructure. It will pick and choose from vast number of courses available online and ask its students to select from those. It will have agreements with service providers who can provide campus like services in different parts of the country/world. In fact, students can stay in different parts of the world in different semesters and what a great learning experience it will be. (Minerva Institute already does that - let students spend different semesters in different countries.) So without owning any content and without owning any infrastructure, it would be able to provide quality education and degrees to students.

This future is exciting, though there are too many unknowns and hence a bit scary as well.

Covid19: Will there be jobs for graduating students

In the last few days, several local media outlets have asked me about placements. And my reply has been that with economy all over the world going down, it is bound to have an impact on job scenario for the graduating students. For the batch graduating in 2020, it would be a few withdrawals and several delayed joining, which is excellent news considering the pandemic situation.

In my opinion, the real problem will be faced by 2021 graduates. The companies in India have traditionally not fired people or gone back on their job promises (though it will happen in some cases given the economic scenario). Also, the government has been requesting companies not to fire their employees, and also honor their job commitments. So most of the companies already have excess manpower, and they have commitments to hire more. Even if they can somehow manage this, making more commitments for 2021 later half does not seem to be a good idea, unless the companies believe that economy will be back on track by July, 2021 or soon thereafter. In some sectors, this may indeed happen, but is unlikely across all sectors.

So, it is likely that fewer companies will do campus recruitment, they will make fewer offers, and perhaps those offers will be for a slightly lesser salary than in the past. Let me hasten to add that I am saying all this in the context of engineering education only.

How should students plan for this tough scenario. Only two mantras: Stay positive and Work hard.

How do you stay positive in the middle of a pandemic. You have a choice: You can feel unlucky that just when you were entering final year, pandemic happened. Or you can feel lucky that you are part of a higher education system that is of such poor quality that you can be among the top with very little additional effort, and there are going to be jobs for the top students.

Covid is not going to change teachers, curriculum, infrastructure, and given that instruction is moving online instead of face-to-face, the quality will only go down in most places. However, staying at home also means that you have huge opportunity to learn on your own through some excellent online resources. The same teacher teaching online is likely to be worse than that teacher teaching in class, not only because there is a lot peer learning in class and in hostels, but also that teacher has a lot of experience of teaching in the class and no experience of teaching online. However, we have a lot of faculty around the world who have learnt the art to be excellent in online education, and these resources are likely to be better than not only the online education provided by faculty of Tier 2 and Tier 3 institutions, but even the in-class teaching by them.

Invest effort in learning from such resources.

Today, the perception of students in our engineering colleges is that academic learning is useless. That none of the courses are of immediate interest to industry. The curriculum is outdated, and so on. They have been told by their seniors that in the placement interviews the technical questions that are asked can be answered mostly by studying 5-6 courses. The other 40-odd courses that they do are there only because the faculty is sadist, the regulators have insisted that engineering be a 4-year degree with a certain minimum credits. And in those 5-6 courses, the best way to prepare for an interview is not really to learn the concepts well, but read up of answers of a question bank.

From my experience of advising 1000s of students in various institutions, I can say that students don't believe that academic learning is useful in career. Instead they believe that while CGPA is important from the point of view of crossing the shortlisting threshold, the extra-curricular and personality and soft skills is what clinches them a job, besides the ability to answer technical questions in those 5-6 courses. A common question that I have asked these students is the number of hours they study on their own, and typical answer is that unless there are exams coming up or there is a project deadline (in which case they may work overnight), they will spend no more than 7-8 hours a week on academics. That is about 1 hour a day. So no revising the content. No self-study. Of course, extra study is totally out of question. That one hour is usually to complete the assignments, or copying notes, if one missed the class. How could you complete all your assignments in such a short period. Well, many instructors don't give any assignments (not even readings), if they do, they don't require to be submitted (so, no need to solve those problems), and if they are required to be submitted, it is best to copy them. So, one hour a day is enough.

What is interesting is that the placement data often shows that there is a correlation between CGPA and the jobs. The most sough after jobs typically come to those with good academic standing. But every year in every college there will be a few students who, despite an average CGPA would have been selected for one of those sought after jobs. Everyone will know of those examples. They often are the role models for next batches (so they can justify not working hard). And no one would believe that there is correlation between CGPA and jobs.

But here is the thing. In most courses, the important learning is not the specific context of that course. The important learning is often more generic like problem solving, critical thinking, etc. And these generic skills are what will enable you to do well not just in the interviews but also in your career. If you are unable to give an absolutely correct answer to a question, it is not an issue in most cases. If you can show that you know how to think about it, how to attack the problem, that is good enough. And that ability you would have if you had tried to solve problems in a variety of scenarios. That is the value of learning all those courses.

Also, adults learn by connecting dots, by putting your learning in the context of other things you know. So if you know more things, you learn new things better. This is another reason to take your academics seriously.

No, I am not suggesting that extra-curricular or having fun is not important. But there is time for both in your life. For example, a good engineering college will tell you that they expect you to spend about 50 hours a week on academics (including lectures, labs, etc.), and that too for only 8 months in a year. That leaves a HUGE amount of time for all your hobbies, passions, both during the semester and during vacation (even with internships).

Not focusing on academics may have been alright till now. But in this year, the competition for jobs is going to be much higher. You have a choice. You can continue to do what you have done in the first 3 years of your engineering education. Or you can work harder in these times and improve your chances of finding a job.

Just ask yourself a question. How have you used these forced stay at home. Did you make use of a large number of free courses available online. Did you complete a few Swayam or Coursera courses. How much time did you spend in doing programming exercises on various sites, if you are from CS/IT or are looking for an IT sector job. How many webinars you attended in these two months to learn some new knowledge. If you didn't do these things, don't blame Covid.

Of course, learning things better would open other options for you. In difficult times, spending extra year(s) in universities could be a great strategy. You get another degree, hopefully from a better known institution, and the economy would certainly be better in a couple of years, and you start a great career at a higher level. So you need to take exams like GATE where it is so easy to improve your scores with just a little bit of additional effort.

I am sure there are others who will advise you to continue ignoring your academics. I hear so many people saying what sectors will have jobs, and what one should focus on to get those jobs. In short, these pundits are telling the students that may be the set of 5-6 courses that they should be preparing for placement interview has changed. May be they should include a course on Machine learning in that set. But the insistence is still on learning just the bare minimum. My take is that if you invest some more hours, you would be able to learn so much more that you will be ready for most jobs.

Covid is not for ever. This too shall pass. Economy will be booming again in a couple of years. But you must prepare yourself for a difficult two years, and be ready when an opportunity knocks at your door.