| | 8 December 2017HIGHERReviewIN MY VIEWCHANGE IN THINKING ­ THE ONLY WAY TO SECURE THE FUTURE OF INDIAN HIGHER EDUCATION SYSTEM By Dr. Vikram Venkateswaran, Management Thinker and Founder-Editor, Healthcare IndiaSatish (name changed) was a final year engineer-ing student at a mid-tier engineering college. Four years ago when he joined the course, things had looked very promising. His father who was a small town shopkeeper had put all life savings in the engi-neering course for his son. Initially, things were looking up. The previous year the college had decent placements, with the average student receiving almost Rs 3, 00,000 as salary from the IT industry. It was on this calculation that Satish's father had put his life savings in the course. But now 4 years later, when the time had come to receive the rewards of the investment, the climate is very different. Global economic conditions had slowed down hiring in IT industry. New technology trends like AI and Automation had added to the slowdown. The traditional models of IT support were falling away. Digital had made an impact and which overall resulted Satish in facing the prospect of a jobless start to his career. The scenario above is playing itself out in most mid-ti-er engineering colleges across India. So what has gone wrong? Let's look at the US which produces around 1 lakh engineers per year for a $ 16 trillion economy. India, on the other hand, produces 15 lakhs engineers for a $ 2 trillion economy. Most of the engineers we produce are not employable. They were finding jobs in IT only due to massive training institutes much like the Infosys campus in Mysore. India had around 1500 engineering colleges in 2005. Today we have close to 3500. Andhra Pradesh has almost 700 of these colleges. Even before automation, it is estimated that 30percent of our engineers never found any jobs. The lucky ones that did found very low paying jobs are compromising with salaries that had been stagnant for almost 10 years. Despite our best efforts, there is almost no demand for engineering jobs in India. The earlier mass recruiting Dr. Vikram Venkateswaran is a marketing leader and digital evangelist. He is the founder of Healthcare India, a social movement for better health. He is also an author and speaker at business and marketing events and alongside serves on the NASSCOM sub-committee on marketing and communication. He was awarded the Distinguished Toastmaster Award by Toastmasters International in 2013.Dr. Vikram Venkateswaran
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