Why Do Indian Students Take Up Engineering Degrees?

Dr. Pushkar, a faculty member at BITS Pilani-Goa, discusses the reasons that motivate students to take up engineering degrees in India.

AsianScientist (Jun. 3, 2013) – In India, and perhaps much of Asia, parents decide what their children study in college. While more young people are telling their parents that they want to study economics rather than medicine, because parents pay for college, and because they know better, they continue to call the shots.

As a rule, a Bachelor of Technology (B-Tech) degree is prized by most Indian parents, especially for sons. After that, a switch to an MBA degree is seen as a sure step to success, which is almost always measured in terms of pay packages.

Since taking up a faculty position at the BITS Pilani in Goa earlier this year, I have been trying to get a better idea about what motivated BITS students to take up engineering in the first place. Was it because they were genuinely interested in cool disciplines such as civil engineering? Or was it because their parents insisted that they pursue a B-Tech degree to get a well-paid job?

I also wanted to know what these motivated and hard-working students wanted to do are after graduation. Were they interested in taking up jobs as engineers? Or were they mostly interested in going to business school next? Did any of them want to become professors at BITS?

Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to talk with several third and final year BITS students about these issues. The numbers are still too small to make broad generalizations of any kind but, nevertheless, our conversations were interesting by themselves.

India’s engineers

India’s engineers have gained worldwide attention for two reasons. First, graduates from the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), many of whom left to the US for higher education from the 1960s onwards and stayed behind, began making a name for themselves in the business and technology sectors over the course of the 1980s and the 1990s.

Second, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and a few others began to write about India and India’s engineers in a flattering vein from the late 1990s onwards.

Engineering was already a popular area of study in the country but global recognition of India’s engineers and their success in the West made the IITs a brand name. Because a good number of successful IITians, and certainly those who got most of the attention, had earned business degrees in the US, an already-existing trend in India became routine.

The mantra became: get a B-Tech degree, go to business school, work for a big company or start your own, make lots of money, get featured in India’s top newspapers (and perhaps even the Wall Street Journal) and live happily thereafter.

Why engineering?

A brief background about BITS Pilani students is necessary. Students at IITs and BITS Pilani are admitted on the basis of intensely-competitive all-India exams. They come from all over the country. Most are men but the numbers of women at least at some institutions is going up. Many have been taught by ‘experts’ in ‘coaching centers’ across the country. They come from rich, middling and poor families, from large cities, small towns and villages. By ‘making it’ to prestigious engineering schools, they are considered an elite group students with a bright future ahead of them.

So why do these students pursue a B-Tech degree in the first place?

The young women and men I talked to hinted at two broad reasons for taking up engineering. To begin with, many of them confessed that, when they finished school, they had no clear preferences about what they should study, whether science, arts or something else. In theory, that made them open to listening to what their parents or family members had to say as well as to others, especially their teachers or seniors at school.

Most students acknowledged that there parents, especially fathers or other male elders in the family, played a big role in deciding that they pursue a B-Tech degree at a good engineering college. While some of them also had an interest in math or physics, their choices were primarily influenced by the fact that family elders felt that the right thing to do in terms of career choices was to get an engineering degree. Thus, some combination of parental/family pressure and personal choice, but leaning more towards the former, was the reason why many students joined BITS Pilani.

Many students also said that they took up engineering because, at school and as well as among family members and friends, the ‘best’ students were expected to opt for engineering. Doing otherwise, like taking up arts and social sciences, was considered foolish. There was, in fact, considerable pressure to reject arts and social sciences.

What after engineering?

Several students hoped to be (and were) recruited on campus by private companies. A few others, I was told, were planning to go to business school or complete a master’s degree at BITS Pilani or elsewhere to improve their job prospects. For some, a master’s degree would also give them more time to re-think their career options.

Given my interest in India’s higher education, I was especially curious to know if any of them were considering an academic career. One student pointed out that a couple of 9-pointers whom he knew from his class were headed for PhD programs in the US. I asked if any of them had talked about the possibility of teaching in India when they returned.

“We know what our universities are like. Why would anyone want to teach here?” was their candid reply.

 
Pushkar is a faculty member at the Department of Humanities and Management at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani-Goa. He has a PhD in political science (McGill University) and previously taught at the University of Goa, Concordia University, McGill University, and the University of Ottawa.

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Copyright: Asian Scientist Magazine; Photo: ensign_beedrill/Flickr/CC.
Disclaimer: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of AsianScientist or its staff.

Pushkar is a faculty member at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) Pilani-Goa.

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