What propels the mad rush for ECE? Is it passion for this stream or merely its job potential?
Once upon an engineering admission season, I met a frail young boy. “I want to do Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE),” he said, even as he furtively looked at his father who was standing next to him. “My father has chosen two or three colleges. I'll pick from them,” he added.
Why do so many students prefer ECE? The boy's answer was: “Because I do not like computer science.” Little did he know that there are quite a few computer science modules in the ECE syllabus, including a paper on computer architecture. Besides, every stream of engineering requires some degree of programming knowledge. Thus, students with no aptitude or interest for engineering end up studying it for four long years of their life. The story repeats every year. So many students take important career decisions based on little more than media reports and the choices made by toppers.
ECE is also seen as a mishmash of various streams with its syllabus including basic requirements for software programming such as data structures and algorithms, electrical engineering topics such as power systems, and core electronics subjects ranging from mobile telephony to Internet protocols.
The supposed advice given to students is: you can always become a software engineer after studying ECE, or a network specialist, or even the area manager of a telecom company. We are witnessing education beginning to mimic a free market, judged solely on the basis of job potential.
An engineering degree is nothing more than a line on the resume which will result in a job. While it was Computer Science before the dot.com bubble burst, now it is ECE. Tomorrow, it will be something else.
The admission process is being driven purely by a “herd mentality,” says V. Kamakoti, chairman of this year's IIT-JEE, Madras Zone. Having also served the role of a student counsellor at IIT, he says parental pressure has a big impact and students are mostly not allowed to be the architects of their own future.
“Students tell me that they made a wrong choice and that they want to pursue either basic science or arts. Except the IITs, not many universities allow a student to do electives in another department. This is a major drawback. The students feel straight-jacketed once they get in. They just want to clear the course and get out, rather than really shine,” he adds.
Though India produces over six lakh engineers every year, less than 25,000 of them go on to do a master's degree. The country produces less than 1,000 Ph.Ds a year. The discipline of electronics engineering, which is all the rage today, produces just a few hundred patents every year, many of them filed by foreign research laboratories that have a base in India.
What many students aspiring to study ECE also do not seem to realise is that about 30 per cent of the graduates do not get a job even a year after completing the course. If students are making irrational choices, universities are even more to blame. Efforts such as the one by the University of Madras to compulsorily award a job-oriented diploma associated with every degree reinforce popular notions regarding the purpose of education.
