Wasted Education

Recently I read a great article about how a well renowned web designer who was getting top chops from the major brands in the world to work for them was getting denied by most of the schools in that area, not because of lack of any skills but due to his lack of having a Master’s degree … the post was about the differing practices of Web Design that they teach in School and that what is being practiced in the Industry.

A community college costs about $5,000 per semester. So that’s $1,000 per course, divided by 15 classes equals about $66 per class. So if students are paying that much money for web design classes, shouldn’t theyat least be getting taught up to date technology?

The pricing figures are pretty much spot on, in India we spend a good 5 lakh INR on getting a decent graduate degree. If the course cannot teach us anything worth then what is the use of such a degree? A study conducted in 2008 showed that a measly 4% of engineering students in India (out of a massive 700,000) are employable. The rest have to be taught from scratch how to code.

This means that the opportunity cost of bring this new joinee up to speed is more than his yearly income. The company has to pay for this learning by providing the right set of education and also pay the new joinee during the period of this education.

With average salary in any decent IT firm being roughly 3-4 Lakh INR, that translates into just under the amount that the graduate has paid to get the degree. A degree which is more or less worthless since it has not taught any practicable skillsets to the graduate.

Is this not a colossal waste of money?

4 thoughts on “Wasted Education”

    1. How can they be put to blame. What else parameter is there to recruit talent? Educational Qualification was supposed to be the proxy for skills, but now it is the proxy for compliance.

      1. I agree. it is a proxy for compliance. But, are HR practices making efforts to change that? They seem to be afraid to stick their necks out and re define the hiring process. So, there is a nice cozy transaction going on between the edu.insti. and recruiters. I guess they do prove Peter Lynch’s statement right – ”
        no fund manager has ever been fired for buying IBM” :-)

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