I dont disagree with the premise that credential based tertiary education credits for jobs are pointless and a genius can come out of any university. You can do well despite of where you studied. There are people who succeed in life due to no talent and just connections.
However, this analysis is just based on outright flawed data. The author has no idea about how education system works in India, or deliberately chose to ignore it because this is what could be done on the data they had accumulated. And I am not talking about the disclaimer about data sample being small, the entire model is wrong for majority of Indian students.
Couple of things I want to comment on when you look at the article and the original paper :
1. The study treats few public institutions as "elite" and private institution as for non-elite people. That is wrong. There are private institutions which are elite too. My alma-mater is one of the elite ones and it was not a public university. This is the least problematic error in analysis.
2. The assumption is a common academic score being used to score university students. For college entrants in early 2000s (the time period when the survey respondents applied to colleges), people had to literally give 50 different entrance exams to get into universities. The score which is used to evaluate who was marginally better to get into elite university and who was rejected (the entire premise of the article), IS NOT what is used to decide entrance into universities in India. Its getting slightly standardized now, but was really chaotic 15-20 years back. There is a common exam that people give at secondary / senior secondary level but very few universities entertain them at entrance. Actually there are many "boards" to give Senior Secondary exams as well. Net net, there is very large variety of ways by which universities in India take entrance. Even the elite ones. I think, given the author is from the field of economics, they are overgeneralizing. A few (not all) economics elite universities do treat senior secondary tests as entrance criterion.
3. Exit exams used to compare academic credentials of students to see if they are academically better than the other DO NOT EXIST ! They dont even exist now and there is no point of them existing. Every public/private university in India (at least the elite ones), have their own grading/curriculum. So the academic credentials cannot be compared directly. With different universities having different grading method, people having somewhat similar academic distribution is a known thing (I dont recollect the name of the phenomenon exactly, but its studied and published). That said, it doesn't go with how the data has been modeled here.
Overall, the author's model is wrong for many (50%+) of Indian students. They might be referring to economics colleges (given they come from field of economics) Delhi University, Mumbai University and Kolkata University type of institutions where their model of tertiary education fits correctly, but in that case her analysis doesn't work well for most of "India". Totally wrong messaging.
However, this analysis is just based on outright flawed data. The author has no idea about how education system works in India, or deliberately chose to ignore it because this is what could be done on the data they had accumulated. And I am not talking about the disclaimer about data sample being small, the entire model is wrong for majority of Indian students.
Couple of things I want to comment on when you look at the article and the original paper :
1. The study treats few public institutions as "elite" and private institution as for non-elite people. That is wrong. There are private institutions which are elite too. My alma-mater is one of the elite ones and it was not a public university. This is the least problematic error in analysis.
2. The assumption is a common academic score being used to score university students. For college entrants in early 2000s (the time period when the survey respondents applied to colleges), people had to literally give 50 different entrance exams to get into universities. The score which is used to evaluate who was marginally better to get into elite university and who was rejected (the entire premise of the article), IS NOT what is used to decide entrance into universities in India. Its getting slightly standardized now, but was really chaotic 15-20 years back. There is a common exam that people give at secondary / senior secondary level but very few universities entertain them at entrance. Actually there are many "boards" to give Senior Secondary exams as well. Net net, there is very large variety of ways by which universities in India take entrance. Even the elite ones. I think, given the author is from the field of economics, they are overgeneralizing. A few (not all) economics elite universities do treat senior secondary tests as entrance criterion.
3. Exit exams used to compare academic credentials of students to see if they are academically better than the other DO NOT EXIST ! They dont even exist now and there is no point of them existing. Every public/private university in India (at least the elite ones), have their own grading/curriculum. So the academic credentials cannot be compared directly. With different universities having different grading method, people having somewhat similar academic distribution is a known thing (I dont recollect the name of the phenomenon exactly, but its studied and published). That said, it doesn't go with how the data has been modeled here.
Overall, the author's model is wrong for many (50%+) of Indian students. They might be referring to economics colleges (given they come from field of economics) Delhi University, Mumbai University and Kolkata University type of institutions where their model of tertiary education fits correctly, but in that case her analysis doesn't work well for most of "India". Totally wrong messaging.