The other day I was talking to a professor friend of mine who is currently the Principal of a top engineering college in Bangalore, India. While discussing the topic of "Education" he said, "We measure the success of our college by the percentage of students that secure employment on campus". "Parents would be disappointed if their wards fail to secure jobs on campus and that would reflect poorly on the institution", he added. By and large this is how most of the colleges, at least in India, measure their success. This has some serious implications and raises several questions worth pondering.
- What's more important for colleges to focus on: Learning/Knowledge or Grades/Jobs?
- What's the relevance of the stuff we learn in college these days? Let's be honest; what percentage of the stuff we learnt in college are we using in our daily life today?
- What will happen to the world of Entrepreneurship & Innovation if most of the top talent is gobbled up by the big corporates on campus?
- What's the motivation for a student to focus learning than grades while most of the companies are looking at academic performance?
- Given the commoditization in the knowledge industry and the irrelevancy of what's taught in professional colleges is it really necessary to have a college education to get a job?
- Is it worth spending 3-5 years in college for what we get in return?
Wouldn't it be better if the colleges started measuring their success by the following metrics?
- How conducive is their campus for learning, experimenting & failing?
- How many of their students have started their own companies?
- How many patents, innovative ideas or projects have come out of their campus?
- What percentage of their students are joining startups rather than big corporations?
- How many of their students are contributing back to community?
- How many of thier students are contributing to the open source projects?
What do you think?
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