Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by hypesafe 2230 days ago
Indian universities outside of the top rung (IITs et al.) have been issuing worthless degrees for at least 3 decades. In my state during the 90s tech/outsourcing boom a lot of corrupt politicians realized that engineering education was a gold mine and opened degree factories all over the state. I graduated from a supposedly "reputable" university in 2004 and was basically unemployable on graduation.

Looking back here are a few memories of my college education experience that stand out:

* 1 computer "lab" with 15 PCs shared amongst 720 students. Only 1 PC had a dial-up internet connection that rarely worked.

* Majority of the courses taught by industry rejects who were unemployable.

* Hilariously we learnt standard nix command line tools (sed , awk, filesystem commands etc.) by writing the commands and their outputs using a pen and paper never once using a real terminal + shell because the college did not have a single nix machine.

* "Systems Programming" professor walks in the first day and declares she cannot code in C and 8086 assembly which the course mandated. She encouraged us to seek external tutoring (coaching classes as they are known in India) instead of relying on her.

* There was small cottage industry that sold finished projects to students - including source code, project reports, electronic circuitry where applicable. About 30% of the class bought these “projects” off the shelf.

Thankfully my family was able to send me to an American university for a graduate degree allowing me to have a shot at a tech career. Now having lived and worked in the Bay Area for 15 years I can say that quality of education at an average community college in the US is far superior to the tier-2 / tier-3 universities in India.