The difference in quality of preparation of students who study to get into the top universities (IITs, NITs, BITS, handful of private/local universities = ELITE) so far outstrips the preparation of your average engineering candidate, that it is not even funny.
To study computer science at an IIT, you have to be in the 0.01 percentile (1 in 1000). Most of my cousins with sufficient wealth, opted to go study Math/CS at Stanford, MIT, etc. instead of going through the grind of getting into an IIT. That's how difficult it can be.
High school exit examinations are a joke. I studied for less than a week for them. I studied for 2 years (8+ hours per day) for JEE, and I was considered one of the 'lazy ones who started late'.
> In short, elite colleges probably do offer their students more value than their competitors—just not in their lecture halls.
This is an outright lie.
The difference in education between the ELITE universities I mentioned above and your average engineering college is that of Harvard vs a Community College. My brother goes to a well regarded sub-elite university, and the drop of quality from the ELITE and his is mind-boggling. Most IIT professors have PHDs at US top 20 universities. Most sub-elite professors are teaching because they couldn't find a job in CS and have never published a paper in their lives. (The delta is 10x worse for any core engineering branches such as Mech,EEE,Civil,etc)
I would have loved for it to be different. It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. But, that is the truth of how things are in India.
Most IIT professors have PHDs at US top 20 universities. Most sub-elite professors are teaching because they couldn't find a job in CS and have never published a paper in their lives.
What does that have to do with the quality of teaching? I feel like you might be falling into the trap of equating "quality" with "eliteness".
It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive.
Agreed, with respect to the US. We would all be better off if, instead of a perfectly scheduled ladder from age 5 to 25 of school, university, and career, it was normal to have a wide range of ages in all university programs, at all tiers. You should be able to decide at 28 or 38 or 58 that it's time to take the qualifying test and be admitted to a prestigious school.
- You studied only a week for high school exams because you already knew most of the material having studied for JEE.
- The "just not in their lecture halls" seems like extrapolation by the journo (I agree with you otherwise). I cant find the pdf of the paper but I doubt the researcher is making that claim. Perhaps it means that motivated students "learn" despite poor teaching at the non-elite colleges.
edit: Ok someone here has posted a link to the paper. The paper is not very good. They arent comparing IITs vs run of the mill colleges. They are comparing public and private colleges within a university which has a common college exit exam. Afaict the university is not even mentioned.
> It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive.
I was pretty lazy at that age, and I know that if I had applied myself a little bit more, I'd be way further ahead now (in fact, the way things ended up going in the 90's, I'd probably be comfortably retired by now if I'd been a bit more academically successful when I was a teenager). I'm not bitter or upset about it, though - I feel like I've gotten what I was willing to work for. I'm watching my own, much more disciplined and motivated, son grind away through his junior year of high school trying to keep his perfect GPA so that he can get into a top college and I can't help but worry that any attempt to make things "fair" would disadvantage not just students like him (potentially, anyway) but everybody: if there's an upper threshold of effort beyond which additional effort is ignored in the name of fairness, it becomes impossible to distinguish the really committed from the "just showing up".
>The difference in education between the ELITE universities I mentioned above and your average engineering college is that of Harvard vs a Community College.
A lot of people (myself included) would say that the difference between Harvard and a community college also resides entirely outside the lecture halls. I can't speak to Harvard, but my experience with community college and a well regarded University of California campus was that instruction was much better at the community college. No one takes a position at an elite US university to teach. They go there to do research. Conversely, the professors at community college don't generally do research, so they have much more time for their students.
I have taken classes in Physics, Math, and CS in a top 20 ranked US university and a university ranked in the 200s. The difference in teaching skill and the difficulty in the materials taught for the same course is massive and very noticeable.
This is not even to go into the research that the professors do and the academic levels that the students are in. The difference is huge.
Which way? My experience was that my (not quite top 20, but close) university professors were an extremely mixed bag. None of them were half as good as my best community college professors, and some of them were downright awful. I would be truly shocked if you told me that lower ranked universities were worse.
For one, courses were significantly more difficult and the homework was harder in the top 20 university. For example, the junior level CS algorithms course I took at both were so different that I wouldn't even call the one I took in the 200s ranked university an actual algorithms course. This was just the worst case though; the other classes were better than this class but the differences were significant.
I agree though that it can be a mixed bag in that there were good and bad teachers in both universities but I found the top 20 university had in general professors who consistently taught better, the courses were better structured, and the professors seemed more motivated to perform well than the 200s ranked university. There were a number of exceptions on both sides but the exceptions favored the top 20 university.
To study computer science at an IIT, you have to be in the 0.01 percentile (1 in 1000). Most of my cousins with sufficient wealth, opted to go study Math/CS at Stanford, MIT, etc. instead of going through the grind of getting into an IIT. That's how difficult it can be.
High school exit examinations are a joke. I studied for less than a week for them. I studied for 2 years (8+ hours per day) for JEE, and I was considered one of the 'lazy ones who started late'.
> In short, elite colleges probably do offer their students more value than their competitors—just not in their lecture halls.
This is an outright lie.
The difference in education between the ELITE universities I mentioned above and your average engineering college is that of Harvard vs a Community College. My brother goes to a well regarded sub-elite university, and the drop of quality from the ELITE and his is mind-boggling. Most IIT professors have PHDs at US top 20 universities. Most sub-elite professors are teaching because they couldn't find a job in CS and have never published a paper in their lives. (The delta is 10x worse for any core engineering branches such as Mech,EEE,Civil,etc)
I would have loved for it to be different. It is entirely unfair that the state of a person from age 15-18 leads to an opportunity gap that's this massive. But, that is the truth of how things are in India.