What do you think of this

As we had often come back to discussing economic benefits/impact of sports I thought it was about time for an economic discussion forum.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by jayakris »

I think prasen is not talking about East Asian education being better. It is the level of research, well-cited papers, patents, etc, that have become much better in the last 20 years in East Asia. It's the same in my field too, so I agree with prasen. The university rankings have nothing much to do with education. If it is just education, and the quality of UG graduates, then our top-5 IITs probably would be much higher ranked. It's research that is the difference. Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, China and Taiwan have come a long way in the last 20 years. Japan Univs that fell behind from their much higher levels earlier on have lately started to stop the fall too. If I am admitting a student for a Masters after a UG engineering degree, the first 5 IITs, Tsinghua U, and KAIST in Korea are my first top pick, over anybody else. But if I am looking at a PhD student after their MS work, graduates from Indian universities are nowhere. Seoul National, Hanyang U etc in Korea, National Univ of Singapore, some 6 or 7 universities in China, and 3 different universities in Hong Kong itself, 1 university in Thailand (Chulalongkorn), at least 2 Univs in Taiwan, etc, are way ahead of graduate from any place in India, as far as my field is concerned. The sole exception for me would be an MS grad from IISc. That was not the case 20 years ago.

I know of how many of the very good PhD graduates rom S universities who were from those East Asian countries have gone back in the 90s and early 2000s to their home countries, and have raised the levels of so many universities in my field. And I also know that so many top graduates from India who wanted to go to India to places like IITs were not even sniffing an interview in IITs where the hiring tended to be very old fashioned - and they had no clue whom to hire. Many have gone back from the US, of course, and there are more foreign PhDs among the IIT faulty now than when i studied in the early 80s, but IITs have simply not hired the best, some of whom wanted to go back (except in some rare instances in my field). A majority of hires of Indian PhDs from the USA in IITs have been rather substandard, selected for whatever backdoor reason that we don't know about. Not that they are bad, but they weren't the best available, and not always from the best universities here. The thing is that those hiring the faculty at the Indian universities rarely had a direct stake in improving their research and publications productivity and rankings in the past, unlike how they were hiring in much of Asia for 20 years. We've improved too, but are still not modern in our thinking about raising the levels of our university research in India, and we have only fallen more behind Asia.

EDIT: I just read that article, after posting this. Many of the universities that came to my mind as places that I knew had improved a lot, are precisely the names the article quotes too.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

Sin Hombre wrote: Sat Sep 16, 2017 10:16 pm I do not see that in my sphere of life at all, we have had to shut down our offices in East Asia and consolidate APAC operations in Australia largely due to finding the quality of hires extremely poor (and these were kids who went to supposed top schools).
Excellent. When I post something, I want to hear the opposing viewpoint. Thanks for adding your experience to the discussion.
My personal experience interviewing a lot of kids who went to NUS, Peking or Tsinghua and then went for higher ed in the US is very similar. Their thought process while structured tends to be very narrow and generally lack curiosity while being defensive. It is a bit of a generalization and I can get into it more later.
You are spot on with this. I see that in my Chinese students too.
Getting out research paper(s) even in the stem fields is mostly a matter of application and guidance, and for the most part, I do not consider it as showing correlation to the actual quality of education (unless the end goal of that education is to have more publications, in which case, well done).
It is not about publications. Yes, they need a lot of application and guidance. Yes, they are possibly not as creative or contributing ideas initially. However, some of them do become well-trained and are quite creative. Then, they have created cutting-edge things that have advanced the state-of-the-art in our field, resulted in starting up companies that have produced excellent products, etc. The contribution to the advancement of science and technology in the last 20 years from East Asia has been significantly more than that from India and that from the non-western world. It is not only papers. It is new technology that has made a difference.

If we consider conventional education, e.g., high school math and science abilities, the kids from East Asian countries have much better skills than those from India or the U.S. If that does not count, well then we are talking about different things.

If we are just talking about UG education, the traditional IITs, Roorkee, would certainly come into consideration. But, talking about universities as those producing better employees is constrained. I am talking about universities as creators of knowledge and innovation. If you are saying that the IITs are under-ranked here, I can accept that. Or whoever is under-ranked. I am not talking about the ranking per se but the change in ranking. Given the same metrics and the same bias, the change in rankings mean something and that something is that these East Asian universities are adding more to our knowledge and creating things that are state-of-the-art that they did not 20-25 years ago. [Of course, I am biased by things happening in my specific field.]

If you look at Nobel laureates, maybe not many East Asian scholars have come up to that level yet. But, the Nobel prize is sort of a lagging indicator because mostly "old" people get it. So, maybe some years later the East Asian scholars will be at that level. But they are on a trajectory that will take them there.

I am not saying that I am the ultimate harbinger of truth. I am providing my viewpoint. If you feel otherwise, please by all means tell us what your experience is. I welcome that.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by PKBasu »

Until 20 years ago (OK, 22 years ago), India had 5 times as many university graduates as China (annually). Now China has quite a bit more. And China has imported top research talent into some of their universities, while India has neglected this aspect (and become somewhat inward looking).
Where India has missed the boat is on quality research -- very little of which is done in Indian universities. Most of the best Indian academics simply go abroad to do their work, because the funding is so much better.
But an IIT or REC graduate is likely to be preferred both by employers and Grad schools around the world, so I think the top Indian institutions are still doing a great job of turning out quality graduates.
India's breadth of undergraduate education also leaves a lot to be desired. After the top few institutions the quality falls off dramatically.
Ironically, Singapore employers usually prefer to employ Singaporeans with any foreign degree to those graduating from NUS and NTU. The quality of writing is particularly bad among Singapore graduates. I always find it amusing when I see the high rankings of NUS and NTU; local employers will often hire foreign graduates of these universities, but not local graduates of the local universities!

In my book, Asia Reborn, I focus quite a bit on the quality of education across the region. Japan's lead in economic development came from the fact that it had achieved universal literacy long before anybody else in the world (other than the US and Germany), and literacy levels were much higher in Korea and Taiwan (both Japan-ruled) in 1945 (around 60%) compared to India and Iraq (both 14%) at the end of British rule (in 1947 and 1958 respectively).
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by Sin Hombre »

jayakris wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 5:43 am But if I am looking at a PhD student after their MS work, graduates from Indian universities are nowhere. Seoul National, Hanyang U etc in Korea, National Univ of Singapore, some 6 or 7 universities in China, and 3 different universities in Hong Kong itself, 1 university in Thailand (Chulalongkorn), at least 2 Univs in Taiwan, etc, are way ahead of graduate from any place in India, as far as my field is concerned. The sole exception for me would be an MS grad from IISc. That was not the case 20 years ago.
This I completely agree with, but is it really that concerning?

I think what India really needs are more places which provide a high quality of undergraduate education which is why the systematic destruction of IITs in the last decade or so (and escalated in the second UPA tenure) is so sad.

We can continue to leverage Western institutions for post grad education and as India continues to develop, we are seeing more and more people returning home afterwards. I can list anecdotal examples for those but I am sure all of us know such.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

I see more research/innovation production by the old IITs in our field. I do not think they have been destroyed at all. The student quality is about the same as before. I would be interested in what Jay and others have seen wrt the recent IIT grads.

Research is the heart and soul of innovation. Most of the innovation in our field came from universities or people who were trained in the top universities and dropped out. Of course, there is some innovation in industry without university roots. If we do not modernize our universities in India to utilize the brilliant man power we have to produce research and innovation, we will be lagging the East Asians and western societies.

A study in the U.S. (from a think-tank) found that research has an economic multiplier of 2.2, which is greater than that of construction, etc. In the U.S. midwest the economies of cities with great research universities have been hit much less than the others after the demise of manufacturing.

Education should not be neglected, but, the creation of knowledge is fundamental if you want to fuel innovation.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by Sin Hombre »

I am not sure if the student quality is the same as before, easier exams lead to more variance in selection. For a long time, having tough entrance exams guaranteed high selection quality which put us in a select group of nations like France, Romania etc.

Increasing (almost doubling) # of students overnight when the original IITs were already constrained was a horrible political decision by the UPA.

I also have to refute this correlation between churning out research papers and innovation. The latter requires creative thinking and a risk taking appetite, while former requires diligence and guidance. During my undergrad years, all of us who considered research publications as a valid resume/cv point were able to get a few out including in hard(er) fields like theoretical computer science in decent publications.

Of course, for the most part, it wasn't considered important and that attitude hasn't changed.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by Sin Hombre »

prasen9 wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 5:55 am It is not about publications. Yes, they need a lot of application and guidance. Yes, they are possibly not as creative or contributing ideas initially. However, some of them do become well-trained and are quite creative. Then, they have created cutting-edge things that have advanced the state-of-the-art in our field, resulted in starting up companies that have produced excellent products, etc. The contribution to the advancement of science and technology in the last 20 years from East Asia has been significantly more than that from India and that from the non-western world. It is not only papers. It is new technology that has made a difference.
Give me some examples of the bolded.

Almost all the major startups from East Asia and China are copycats of Western ones - similar to ones founded by my peers and acquaintances in India like Zomato and Flipkart.

Nor am I aware of any major drug molecules invented in one of these. Almost all the cutting edge research in that field continues to happen in the US or European academia.
If we consider conventional education, e.g., high school math and science abilities, the kids from East Asian countries have much better skills than those from India or the U.S. If that does not count, well then we are talking about different things.
I agree that in conventional exam scoring, they would rank higher than rest of the world including India. Most of conventional education tests rote learning.

India is a poor country with limited resources - I would rather us spend that on ensuring basic education for all and improving the quality and number of elite undergrad institutions.
I am talking about universities as creators of knowledge and innovation. If you are saying that the IITs are under-ranked here, I can accept that. Or whoever is under-ranked.
That requires generous amounts of funding which Indian universities lack. Or a culture of continued entrepreneurial success aligned with geographical advantages like a Stanford does.

We cannot really compete on postgrad education in India; we need to ensure that we at least do on the undergrad levels. Given our adaptability as a people, we can continue to leverage Western institutions for the same for another generation.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

Sin Hombre wrote: Sun Sep 17, 2017 11:00 pm Give me some examples of the bolded.
The Chinese companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent have built deep learning technologies in house that are better or comparable to things that cutting edge US companies have built and they have been doing that for a while. AI Revolution in China Now admittedly, it will be difficult to separate the contributions of US-trained engineers from the Chinese-trained ones. But, their China labs made substantial contributions and developed things themselves and a substantial part of that manpower was Chinese-trained. Also, from what I have seen about the projects in Tsinghua, Beida, Fudan, etc., they are very capable of building it on their own. And, their students who come out are at par with our U.S. students with respect to knowledge, creativity, etc. I am only talking about Tsinghua, Peking U., Fudan, CSTC, Shanghai Jiaotong, Zhegian or so. I have hired several of them as post-docs because US educated CS Ph.D.s do not want to do post-doc. The Ph.D.s coming out from Indian universities (with a few exceptions here and there) are of substantially poorer quality.

This article points out face recognition technology deployed to catch jaywalking, chatbots, etc. as being ahead in China. It also says that possibly Google is much ahead in its AI technology that it has not disclosed and that is true. But, there are things in which Baidu was ahead a year ago. I cannot mention which --- I will check if they have publicly released that, but, the first article alludes to it.

There are many other articles that has started comparing China and the U.S. wrt their AI research and advancement.
Nor am I aware of any major drug molecules invented in one of these. Almost all the cutting edge research in that field continues to happen in the US or European academia.
Be prepared to see more from China. Here is a select list of drug molecules discovered in China. Drugs discovered in China I will find more in this regard when I have time.
I agree that in conventional exam scoring, they would rank higher than rest of the world including India. Most of conventional education tests rote learning.

India is a poor country with limited resources - I would rather us spend that on ensuring basic education for all and improving the quality and number of elite undergrad institutions.
The quality of Indian students are not increasing that much. In fact, it is quite poor in many schools in India. As evidenced by the PISA tests. Look at the questions. PISA Questions You need a little bit of intelligence and not just rote learning to do these. And, even if it is rote learning, we need some amount of that rote learning to build the basics. You think that the students who performed badly in these tests can perform excellently in the Math Olympiad? I would bet not. And, even in the math olympiad, the US was possibly #1 and China #2. See: Math Olympiad. China has consistently come #1 or #2 for a while.
That requires generous amounts of funding which Indian universities lack. Or a culture of continued entrepreneurial success aligned with geographical advantages like a Stanford does.
Stanford and Berkeley made Silicon Valley and not vice-versa. I believe China, Korea, Singapore, heck, maybe even Japan and India started at about the same or at least a pretty low level of economic status. The East Asian countries have poured in generous amounts of funding and that is why they are starting to produce in-house research. India has not. It has just started in the last 5-8 years and the results have started to show a bit. And, unless you are calling the research wrong, the money invested in research pays itself by increasing the economic activity several fold. That is why the East Asian countries are doing that.
We cannot really compete on postgrad education in India;
This is absolutely wrong. The East Asian countries have shown that you can. As Jay mentioned, all India has to do is to get some of the top scholars trained abroad come to the IITs etc. And, there are quite a few I know who would if given the opportunity to do good research. Some who have gone back with good intentions and could not deal with the system and come back to the U.S. If you have Indian scholars doing great work, a substantial number of Indian students will possibly not come to the U.S. And, even if they do, China and Korea have shown that if you have a big population and a reasonable high school supply system even with the crop that stays back, you can produce good research.
we need to ensure that we at least do on the undergrad levels.
This we absolutely need to do and continue doing beyond the IITs. Even the NITs are sort of hit and miss with respect to their quality. And, beyond the top 20-30 colleges, they come with degrees in CS and do not even know the basics! We do produce a whole load of crappy engineers too possibly from for-profit no-name colleges.
Given our adaptability as a people, we can continue to leverage Western institutions for the same for another generation.
But, your economic development is faster if you develop things in-house. Country after country has shown that. We can continue as we have with the rest of the world progressing or we can decide to create an environment for innovation both in academia and in industry in India.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by Sin Hombre »

Be prepared to see more from China. Here is a select list of drug molecules discovered in China. Drugs discovered in China I will find more in this regard when I have time.
It is a pretty small list and all of it is sponsored by Western companies.

Of course, it is a valid argument that China is more friendly and has shown a greater interest in inviting Western companies to set up research labs in China as this Novartis guy mentioned here

http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/com ... 271938.ece

The quality of Indian students are not increasing that much. In fact, it is quite poor in many schools in India. As evidenced by the PISA tests. Look at the questions. PISA Questions You need a little bit of intelligence and not just rote learning to do these. And, even if it is rote learning, we need some amount of that rote learning to build the basics. You think that the students who performed badly in these tests can perform excellently in the Math Olympiad? I would bet not. And, even in the math olympiad, the US was possibly #1 and China #2. See: Math Olympiad. China has consistently come #1 or #2 for a while.
Ah prasen, you walked into a trap here since this is one of my expertise areas :p

I was heavily involved in our maths (please no math here) olympiad programs during my time, and as an aside those were better times for us when we used to finish regularly in the top 10, and while I am always proud about those achievements, I can also say that the maths olympiad is the one that is the most abstract and being geared towards elegant solving of relatively simple problems in classical math has very little correlation with more practical applications.

Particularly for India, but also for France which has the best engineering culture in Europe and also struggles in the IMO, preparing for IMO can only be done at the expense of preparing for JEE. In my years of being at the national camp for the IMO, there was only other person who also did well at the JEE.

Compare our performance at the IMO to our performance in IPhO or IChO (which are closer to JEE) and you can our performance in the former is an aberration due to the very nature of the contest. Of course, China does well in those as well.

In general while recruiting, I prefer seeing the Physics and Informatics Olympiad winners on the resume (despite my own credentials).

Also I copied this from elsewhere but there has been criticism of the IMO craze in China

A good analogy given by a famous Chinese Math professor, who criticized the "IMO Craze" in China, since 1985 as China wins the World IMO Championship and hundreds of IMO Gold medals for continuously 3 decades :--

Math Research = Martial Art (aka Kungfu 武术功夫);
IMO Math = Acrobatics (杂技, not real kungfu).

Prof S.S. Chern (陈省身 Wolf Prize 1983) and Prof S.T. Yau (邱成桐, Fields Medal 1982) were always surrounded by keen IMO Math students for tough IMO questions, to whom the 2 professors just squarely replied "I don't know how to do it!". It was reported that some Chinese IMO Gold medalists entered PhD class at Harvard and failed, because PhD Math research problem has no quick solution with known techniques, it usually takes many years to see result, unlike IMO Math questions with known solution by astute tricks.



I'll get to the AI/ML claims in a bit as well as further expanding my thoughts on where India stands.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

Trap or no trap, you can claim that all objective measures of advancement in math (I understand that math is the American version, while maths is the British common version now, but, traditionally it used to be math and when it became maths in the 20th century or why is unclear to me. A lot of American English is old British English that got fossilized and did not change while it changed in Britain. Mathematics is a singular noun. Anyway, whatever abbreviation we use is irrelevant), science, and technology are useless. I have at least produced several pieces of evidence that shows that the Chinese have performed better in these tests that can be measured. The ability to study effectively and find ways to do well in a test is something intelligent and not something to be scoffed at. The bottom line is that in all sorts of tests ranging from PISA to the Math Olympiad, India has done worse than China. Why? I do not think genetically worse or more stupid than them. I think that they are doing a better job at educating their kids. If our kids cannot do that PISA tests and perform well, that is a damning indictment of a sub-standard education system.

The anecdotes aside, here is the distribution of graduate math students at Harvard and Berkeley. Note the number of Chinese students who got in and the number of East Asian students (especially at Berkeley which is a larger class) and the number of Indian students. Universities attended by Math Ph.D. students. Most grad students actually graduate with a Ph.D. unless they drop out to seek a job or so. I don't know what happened to those Chinese students but if you keep at it and keep trying different things, getting a Ph.D. is not that hard. Look at Graph C on Page 7 of this report: NSF Report on Ph.D.s in the U.S. China and South Korea have done very well. India has done fine too but possibly lower than the per capita rate of China and S. Korea. So, it is not like China is producing these students who cannot do Ph.D. work. Those two students who dropped out of Harvard were anomalies. I have seen rather mediocre people graduate from Harvard Maths if they stuck at it.

If you look at Fields Medal winners, a couple went to Kyoto University. I don't know any who went to Indian universities. May be they are there.
Fields Medal If you go a notch down and look at the Abel Prize, we have Varadhan who did work at Chennai and ISI, Kolkata. And, I think there are no East Asians. Turing Award, we have Raj Reddy and East Asians do not have any.

But, I think for these medals, you need a lifetime of work. The East Asians (sans Japanese) have come up in the last 20 years. I think in the next 20, they will have some winners in these areas.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by suresh »

All you guys seem to be experts on a lot of things. Can you tell me, an average Indian professor, as to what I should do to improve myself and my university's ranking?

Background: I tend to ignore rankings* (and work on things that interest me), our academic administrators try to see how to game the rankings, most people in the country think we are losers as we can't even make it to the top 100.

* There are so many different rankings which makes things even more confusing.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

Suresh, I have never argued individual faculty members should try to adapt to make it higher in the rankings. I don't do it myself. I don't even know where PSU is on the rankings. All I am arguing is that the government invests more in research and the universities focus more on research and reward people who do good research.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by jayakris »

suresh wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 9:42 amAll you guys seem to be experts on a lot of things. Can you tell me, an average Indian professor, as to what I should do to improve myself and my university's ranking?
Like prasen said, there is nothing much any of you individual faculty can do about it. But all of you know the dead-weight faculty that were hired over time around you, who are not doing the best research. Do whatever you can to avoid hiring such faulty in future. Again, your individual input to the process would be limited but it can be done.

Let me give my experience. When I came to do grad studies research in Transportation Systems to the US in 1985, I was actually the first student (that I know of) from any IITs who applied for the area in civil engineering, which was new then and had only a 20 year history in the world itself, as a field of civil engineering. I wrote to the directors of all five IITs in 1990 when I had an offer to teach at University of California, saying I was willing to drop that offer and come to India, and only 3 even replied, and only one that said a "may be" - so I stayed with the offer I had. Anyway, that is just a side matter... Right after me, IIT madras produced a sequence of 5 or 6 students who came to the US who all became top professors in my field (and some people in the US, mostly non-Indians who were our advisors or contemporaries call it the "Golden generation of Transp Systems guys from IIT Madras", though it is totally unknown to IITM :) ). China had hardly anybody studying the area in the US in the late 80s like us. The first student that I taught traffic flow theory to, and co-advised in the early 90s for his PhD, became a professor later, a well-known authority in traffic theory and now considered pretty much the first (or one of the first 2 or 3) among Chinese students who got PhDs in the field. These days when I am at conferences, the Chinese faculty would introduce me as the one who taught him, and it is instant respect :) ... Many of them even know who his professor was. Indian faculty have no clue on such things. The Chinese universities keep up with that. It is all the academic culture. They know who is doing the best research as up-and-coming recent graduate from China, or who is a recent professor in the US from China whom they could get to go stay at the Chinese univ for a year on leave. I have seen none of that stuff from India.

Now, there are many professors at IITs whom I know and occasionally meet (and many are my friends I remember meeting at various venues when they were studying in the US). They have even experienced the academic culture. But not one of them has ever asked me who the best Indians coming out from top programs in the US are. I actually know some of that quite well, because I know all the top professors in my field and if they have a top-notch Indian student, they would usually tell me at some point somewhere - in some cases because I would have probably tried to recruit that student from an IIT or something, in competition with those professors. I, as well as the other few early 90s PhD graduates from India that I mentioned, would know of the top prospects in the US. But none of us are ever asked, by Indian universities. It's like, we are here to help if you want, but at least ask us. The ones who worked with top research groups are potentially the ones who will come to India to do top research. If you don't attract them, you will get nowhere. The Chinese and Koreans know that. The Indian faculty just never seems to have that kind of "let us do something on our own to improve our group" mentality. Nobody ever contacts an Indian professor to see if there is somebody who is top-notch to hire, and if they would apply (most Indian grad would apply to IITs if they feel that somebody out there at least found them, and that there is maybe a chance). That never happens. But I routinely get those questions from faculty from the US and Asia, about my students as well as other potential ones. Without top faculty, we will never build top-level funded research programs to make a dent in the rankings, even if the Indian government wanted to throw money at our universities (which they anyway don't want to). We have to target some good people from abroad, and get them to come to India.

suresh, you would know what any individual faculty can do in India. Probably not much. But at least make an attempt to see if you can attract some good quality products to apply for a position in your university and if you can find a way to pull some strings to make it happen.
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by prasen9 »

In my field, at least in IIT, Mumbai and IIT, Kharagpur there are some individual faculty who are doing great, world-class research. But, these are a handful. IIT-Kanpur has some people who are tops in theory. Etc. So, some people are doing things even within the system. I fully agree with Jay. We should hire more people like them. And, a system should be set up so that research-active faculty are teaching less and those who do no research should be asked to teach more. Etc.

Forget about the rankings, I was using the delta-rankings as an indicator. Here is another voice:R. Venkatraman.
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suresh
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Re: What do you think of this

Post by suresh »

jayakris wrote: Mon Sep 18, 2017 10:16 pm suresh, you would know what any individual faculty can do in India. Probably not much. But at least make an attempt to see if you can attract some good quality products to apply for a position in your university and if you can find a way to pull some strings to make it happen.
While I cannot comment about Engineering, we definitely try to get good people to apply for jobs in my department. The application is a slow process and turns off some people. So we've made changes that have helped in this regard. The first one is that applicants need to only upload their application. The second is that they need NOT to come to attend the interview -- Skype is used in such cases especially if they have already visited the department and given a seminar at an earlier time. The quality of our pool has improved significantly and I have seen huge improvements in my department especially in the last five years. Now it is a waiting game to see if they (the younger faculty members) continue to produce work of similar quality after joining the department.
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