i cannot help but agree with these kind of statements. being a high school student myself i feel the IITs are a bit overrated. another reason is a large part of the yearly education fund budget prepared by the Govt. goes to these ‘elite’ n ‘prestigious’ institutions.i guess the reason for this maybe because excellence in teaching is not rewarded as much as it shud be.

Quality of education is good but i dont think anyone can say that its the best anywhere in the world.

i think that foreign universities in india would surely improve standards of education but the govt. shud surely regulate the fees of such institutions

the focus is on quality output, at your pace. Hence the wringer analogy

Good undergrad engineering programs tend to be intense in terms of the level of work. Grad programs can be a little bipolar. There are times when it is super-intense, and then there are times when you can work at your own pace. If you catch one of the lean periods, is nice! two thumbs up

These two statements are contradictory.

It gives me such a kick to see my alma mater being discussed so much on Sepia Mutiny.

And to all ur other IITians, IIT M is the best

Let us not belabour the obvious

Huzzah to all the IITs, I say. I haven’t really found a significant difference in the rigor of the education or the quality of the students (primarily engineering skills) between the established IITs (I just haven’t met too many people from IIT Guwahati).

There might be differences in quality across IITs if you look at it department by department. For instance, the department of Computer Science at IIT Bombay is probably the best.

…puts their grad students through the wringer

Pretty much yeah, Neale. The point of grad school is that you like this shit and you want to do your very best to be an expert in your field. That immediately implies that for a particular PhD program to be strong, they must also be very rigorous so that graduates of that program are, in fact, experts – i.e. they can take on most challenges in that field. Ultimately, when you apply for faculty/researcher positions (the main point of a PhD program), you pit yourself against kids from all the top programs in the US, Europe and Asia (the Aussies and Kiwis tend to stay within the ‘continent’). If you need to succeed, therefore, you need to be on par with peers in any of the best programs. Time is not a constraint in grad school – the focus is on quality output, at your pace. Hence the wringer analogy.

Let us not belabour the obvious

Mind you, it was a struggle for many nevertheless in my time (early ’90s) and continues to be so, even those from the middle class (those families who haven’t been touched by the IT/Finance/Telecom booms). Not many are aware of loan schemes that they can avail of from PSU banks. SBI, for example, has a scheme (used to be known as Gyanjyoti) for meritorious students (60% marks at every level) to assist with professional/technical education. The catch is that they may insist on some kind of collateral (life insurance policies can be used), which usually means really poor people may not be able to avail of it.

As for quality of education, one obvious problem is rampant AICTE corruption. A friend of mine who runs a college that hands out bachelor degrees told me there were ‘fixed rates’ for securing affiliation depending on the programs offered. There are several other stories. Thankfully, for colleges that want to offer BTech/MCA/MBA degrees, AICTE officials apparently are a bit stringent on the minimum infrastructure. Quality of teaching is an altogether different matter. Students at state colleges as well as shoddy private colleges have mostly given up on this and fend for themselves.

And to all ur other IITians, IIT M is the best