On Tuesday 05 Oct 2010 3:44:26 am keith.adam0 wrote: > Given the huge population of India, what is the percentage of young adults > studying engineering or medicine? What of the percentage (who can > quantify?) that can never conceive the idea of going to a school, college, > or university that offer these courses? >
When I was a young man (I joined college in 1972) it was mainly the elite who entered college and among them the particular courses that were thought to guarantee employment were engineering and medicine and there was intesnse competition for those courses. But "competition" in those days was nothing compared to today. India produces 400,000 engineers a year (and 100,000 of them are employable as engineers) India produces perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 medical graduates a year. If you take the total figure as half a million you have to set that up against (I'm guessing) about 18-20 million people reaching the age of 18 every year. Since those half million engineering and medical seats represent (in the minds of Indians) the "top of the heap" - they are aspirational and a school system that does not gear a child up for engineering or medicine will be rejected in India. A healthy society requires people other than doctors and engineers and some form of education is necessary. Many children figure out what they need to fall back on once they do not get that prized engineering or medicine seat (to the great disappointment of many parents) . Schools do not guide or equip children to become anything else. Colleges do. Children are efectively asked to choose between engineering or medicine by the time they are 15 years old and failing that they have to start wondering what else it is that they can do. This is less true for the elite who are able to reel off a list of lucrative alternative vocations. But for a school going child who has no intention of becoming a doctor or engineer, it is what we discussed earlier - tough shit. The elite in India send their kids to fancy schools who charge good money to fulfil the requirements of those parents' dreams of an ideal school. The children in those schools are exposed to a few dozen of their socio-economic peers. It's only by the time a child starts approaching college that he begins to see what Indian education is all about. The child finds himself competing with perhaps a million others who are all equipped to write an engineering or medicine entrance exam and practically nothing else. shiv
