Appalling state of Software Education in Engineering Colleges

Have u ever wondered that how many engineering colleges are there in India? Approx 2500!! On top of that, every year 600-800 new applications come to AICTE to open new engineering college by people who have very little interest in education itself. On an average each college would produce 400 students per year. That means each year they produce 10 LAKHS Students. At least 6-8 Lakhs of them try their luck in Software. That’s BIG number. Software Industry can’t absorb more then 2 Lakh of them. What happens to rest of 4-6 Lakhs? BTW these are very conservative numbers. People looking for job in Software Industry might be much higher.

Another interesting thing is that almost all of them have only 6-7 departments like Computer Science, Electronics, Information Science, MCA and Electrical. Do we think India doesn’t need engineers in other streams? The whole idea of setting up a engineering college is to in-cash the dream of software industry.

These engineering colleges might be helping to produce the manpower required for Software Industry. But in the process we are producing LOT MORE unhappy low skill software graduates. Even those who get job are not in too great position due to low level of education they got.

Now let us have a look on the quality of teachers in each college. Due to lack of appreciation by college managements and low salary, most of the good teachers never want to teach in these colleges. That leaves with very few skilled teachers in colleges. If you leave the HOD of each department average experience of teachers are not more than 2-3 years of teaching in engineering college. You can find out this info from their website where they have mandatory disclosure about faculty.

As one would expect the engineers coming out of these colleges are very low skilled in Software Engineering Fundamentals. That also explains few interesting thing that even after 20 years of great Indian software export story,

1) India has very few international level software products done completely in India.

2) Top 10-20 Internet Companies who has revolutionised the world in recent past are not from India.

3) India still lags behind other countries in real research done in software.

So where is the problem? Pathetic state of software education in colleges? Perhaps yes.

Solution India badly needs software colleges which has dedicated high quality software faculty. I hope someone is listening.

About ME My name is Suresh Kumar and I have 16 years of Software Industry experience in USA and India in companies like Sun Microsystems, Yahoo!, and Microsoft at senior mgmt position. These days I run a small (50 student) full-time software school (ISAC Software Academy) to do my bits of right software education. You can find more details at http://www.isacacademy.com.