$10 billion lost

The economic times has an article, titled "Students' exodus costs India forex outflow of $10 billion." The article starts off by informing that 500,000 students choose to go abroad every year for higher studies. Assocham president Sajjan Jindal says,

The primary reason why large number of Indian students are forced to opt for foreign universities is that Indian institutions have high capacity constraints. This trend can be reversed by opening a series of quality institutions with public private partnership by completely deregulating higher education.

Also vocational education percentage in India is at meagre 5 percent of its total employed workforce of 459.10 million as against 95 percent of South Korea, 80 percent of Japan and 70 percent of Germany. China has over 500,000 vocational schools while India has less than 3,000 such institutions. This makes a strong case for India to allocate a substantial percentage of its budgetary allocations to promote vocational education to make the country a manufacturing hub.

I have no idea by what it means. Vocational training is primarily imparted in ITIs. Is Assocham wanting to open more of them? Fine.

However, opening a series of quality institutions for higher education is not so easy. Most of the private schools (BITS is an exception) have not been very successful. If IITs are facing a problem in getting good faculty, then the problem will even more acute for a private institution. Further, I think the numbers are hugely inflated. Several students go abroad for undergraduate and graduate education abroad even if they get admitted in IITs. This is because the career opportunities are better. To claim that the exodus of students will stop if we have more colleges/ institutes / universities is foolhardy.

Life in academia

The chronicle has an interesting article titled "Why are more and more graduate students turning away from careers at research universities?"The article starts off with the remark that faculty who graduate students hear a lot these days (according to the article) "I don't want to live your life." I do not have such a problem because I do not have a life :-)

Academia in research institutions was never meant to be a 9-to-5:30 job. While a day in the life of a graduate student can be grueling (or look like grueling), the numbers of hours one puts in during this period is not significantly higher than someone who practices cricket every day to join the Indian cricket team.

Intelligence alone is often insufficient to succeed in any job. In the book, "Greatness: Who makes History and Why?", Simonton quoting the famous Anna Pavlova says "Success depends in a very large measure upon individual initiative and exertion, and can not be achieved except by the dint of hard work." He further says,

Only clock watchers and time card punchers put in just 40 hour weeks. Creative output in the science correlates positively with the number of hours devoted to scientific research. One study found that distinguished researchers in the physical and social sciences worked 60-70 hours per week for virtually the entire year..and all exhibited a driving absorption in their work.....To convince the skeptical sloths, let us move to a higher plane of evidence. In lieu of specific cases, suppose we examine group statistics. Wayne Dennis studied contributors to disciplines as diverse as music, linguistics,...and chemistry. He found that the top 10% who were the most prolific in each field could be credited with about 50% of all contributions to the field. In contrast, those among the 50% who were at the least productive were responsible for only about 15% of all the work. There is even a law that expresses how much the elite monopolizes a creative endeavor. According to the Price law, if k is the number of persons active in a discipline, then the square of this number approximates the size of that subset who produced half of the contributions.

A senior colleague of mine has done an interesting study. He has taken the 7th standard marks of all the professors working in the university and tried to find a correlation. The correlation coefficient was less than 0.1, indicating that performance at the school is not necessarily a good indicator of whether the person will become a professor in an academic university.

The article seems to imply that professors liking their jobs and working hard has resulted in students turning away from academics. A youngster can not complain that he has to practice for ten hours in the sun to make it to the cricket team. Sachin Tendulkar still practices as hard as anyone else in the cricket team. A youngster should instead marvel at Sachin working so hard (even after achieving so much) rather than complain ! Further, after completing graduate school, one need not work in a research university. One can work in teaching oriented universities, in industrial labs and so on.

In some instances, the requirement of working hard may also dissuade non-serious science "enthusiasts" Recently, in IISc, we admitted two graduate students for the master's program who had great ideas on winning the Nobel prizes during their course program. When it was pointed out to them rewriting the second law of thermodynamics will require them to first understand thermodynamics thoroughly (taking a course, for example) and then working hard, they left the program. I do not think, however, this was bad.

However, all this is moot. Science is supposed to be entertaining and engaging. In IISc, for example, you can find faculty working for 30 hours or 100 hours a week and get paid the same. Many of us work for long hours because one finds pleasure in doing this work rather than anything else. If graduate students are turned off because professors enjoy their jobs so much that they work hard, so be it.

IISc college

In an interesting article on IISER, Shobo Bhattacharya makes very valid points, most of which I agree with. However, when the discussion on IISc comes up, here is what he has to say,

Aware of this conundrum, the Planning Commission of India recommended recently that eminent research institutes like the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR) and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) embark upon undergraduate education by establishing, for example, a TIFR-College and an IISc-College. The idea has had little traction with institutes however and has produced additional skepticism. Some of the researchers are concerned that teaching duties will seriously impair their ability to conduct world-class research, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary.

The overwhelming evidence that teaching aids research is based on university systems in USA and elsewhere. It is a forgotten fact, however, that the tutorials and grading of assignments for the undergraduate courses in US are exclusively done by graduate students. The professors are hardly involved in these activities and this saves considerable time that can be devoted for research.

People who are favor of IISc college extensively argue that this will result in better graduate students doing doctorates in the country. Institutes like IITs, where faculty are involved both in undergraduate teaching as well as research, find that practically none of their undergraduate students go on to do a doctorate in India. Therefore, if IISc starts an IISc college dedicated for undergraduate teaching (which I think it will) and all the active research faculty teach in this college, how many of these students will go on to pursue a doctorate in India? My guess is less than 5%. Therefore, the input quality of graduate students to IISc will largely remain the same even if IISc and TIFR open colleges.

IISER, NISER

In his blog, my colleague talks about setting up IISERs and NISERs. He mentions that the previous government mentioned that IISERs were supposed to be setup in Allahabad, Bhubaneswar, Chennai and Kolkata. The current government overruled it and said it will be set up in Kolkata, Chennai, Mohali, Bhopal and Thiruvananthapuram while a NISER would be setup in Bhubaneswar. Are the IISERs and NISER different? Obviously not, except that NISER is funded by DAE. Except for IISER-Chennai, all the others have been setup and their directors have been appointed. The following link even compares the academic credentials of the directors. Thus, the only city that was dropped was Allahabad and it becomes obvious why if you consider where the previous government's HRD minister got his doctorate from. People in the "know" seem to explain why IISER Chennai has not been setup, yet. The point of Abi's blog, however,is that the policies of the government has been changed by its successor is well taken but this is not surprising at all.

Regarding the question whether IISERs/NISER are successful, it depends on the criteria you set. I do not know how one evaluates an academic institution in India. I do know, however, that atleast two of the above IISERs have received more than thousand applications each for their faculty positions in the four science subjects. A large number of students write the entrance exam and are interviewed. Their faculty have got funding from DST etc and have started publishing papers. However, infrastructure problems remain but are hopefully, teething. Even an established institution like IISc, which got 100 crores in 2007, will complete all its buildings only in 2009. Anyone who works in administration will tell you that getting hundred crores from the government is much easier than spending it following all the myraid (and, maybe, archaic) rules.

However, I do think that the success of an institute is judged mainly by its students. If world-class motivated students join and their motivation is sustained, this will result in an excellent institution. Despite flaws, exams like JEE/CAT/GATE that filter out 95% of the candidates result in world class students. However, the motivation in them has to be sustained. [The fact that B.Tech students who do not get any jobs or admitted for higher studies teach other B.Tech students in many private engineering colleges demotivates most of the incoming undergraduate students.] The incoming students will remain motivated only if the faculty are world-class and motivated.

With the current scarcity of good faculty, a rapid recruitment of faculty just to fill up the position will result in a bleak future for these institutions. Even if world-class faculty are recruited by IISERs, these faculty will remain motivated if and only if it is augmented by excellent infrastructure like lab facilities , efficient administration that is not required to follow outdated arcane rules, merit based evaluations for all promotions/ awards, ability to expand without the mentality that small is beautiful, unfettered research grants, emphasis on excellence rather than social networks and, finally, money. However, granting only the last (money) makes that the required condition for excellence is met but sufficient conditions for creating and maintaining excellence (in academics) are not met.

Research Double

One of my former students recently wrote to me and congratulated me on the "double" of 200 papers and 2000 citations. The term double comes from cricket where 100 wickets and 1000 runs is the start for a good all rounder.

In research, however, citations are of more importance than the number of papers. I know of faculty in USA who have published less than 50 papers but have more than 2000 citations.For example, the editor of the journal (in which I regularly publish) has less than 75 papers but she has more than 4000 citations. However, there are no such exceptional cases in India. In India, the number of papers and citations seem to have a direct correlation. Some statistics based on the "double" for IISc (includes retired faculty),

Number of faculty who have > 1000/10000: 1 (Prof. CNR Rao)
Number of faculty who have > 400/4000: 2 (Prof. P.Balaram)
Number of faculty who have > 300/3000: 5 (0 in engineering)
Number of faculty who have > 200/2000: 26 (2 in engineering)
Number of faculty who have > 100/1000: 74 (7 in engineering)

In cricket, there is a treble: 100 wickets, 1000 runs and 100 catches. In research, we may have 200 papers, 2000 citations and h-index of 20. The above numbers do not change for the treble.

Okay, how this compare internationally? Let us take Purdue university. How many faculty of Purdue have > 300/3000? The answer is 300.

Faculty Pay based on teaching

My colleague provides some interesting links about better and effective teaching. Taking this to an extreme, my alma mater, Texas A&M University, has recently instituted a system where a bonus pay of $10,000 per year will be given based on teaching evaluations by students. This seems to be a blatant approach of consumerism to higher education. While student evaluations of faculty are important, it is well known that "good" student evaluations can always be obtained if the faculty gives out easy grades and does not give out hard assignments. A major study by Ohio State University in 2007 found absolutely no correlation between student evaluations and actual learning.

But Aleamoni said that even if his research suggests that some student evaluations — designed in ways that differ from the Texas A&M approach — can be reliable, he has always stressed that these evaluations should never be the sole basis for a decision about the quality of someone’s teaching. “Students are only in a position to judge performance in the classroom,” Aleamoni said.

Any real evaluation of teaching, he said, must include peer analysis of such issues as, “How well was the course designed? Are the materials current and up to date? Have they set up the right kinds of standards for the students?” And students aren’t in a position to judge these things, he added.

Of course, one does not have to worry about this in IISc, where teaching is minimal. At one time I used to teach three main courses and now I have decayed to teach three students in one course.

However, this is not dissimilar to the schemes instituted by the Government of India wherein one gets paid various amounts of money (sometimes, concurrently) if faculty get fellowships like the Swarnajayanthi, JC Bose etc., or awards like the Bhatnagar or are elected as Fellows of Academies. As Professor Balaram notes in his recent editorial, most of these are given based on promise and patronage rather than performance.

Wouldn't it be better if the rewards are given without personal money but with huge research or teaching grants? This would result in the faculty actually doing science rather than writing proposals to various funding agencies or lobbying to get themselves nominated for these fellowships.

Excellence in Research

Prof. C. N. R. Rao, in his inspirational talk today titled "Doing Science in India: How to Succeed!" gave four main tips for succeeding in doing research in India. They are picking the right problem, working hard, perseverance and publishing the work. He also mentioned the need to think big by graduating more doctorates (he mentioned that all IITs together graduated only a total of 598 doctorates in 2007) and publishing more papers.