50% engineering colleges will shut down.
Parents need to change their approach towards education.
USA produces around 1 lakh engineers per year for a $ 16 Trillion economy. India produces 15 lakhs engineers for a $ 2 Trillion economy.
If there are so many engineers, there must be enough demand to pull them in. But it is not there. The earlier mass recruiting sector was manufacturing. It used to recruit from the core branches like civil, electrical and mechanical. But, manufacturing is stagnant at just 17% of the GDP. So the core branch placements have become difficult.
The new mass recruiter is the IT sector. It grew from scratch to almost 5% of the GDP in 25 years. Employed millions of engineers across the country.
Now, IT is also saturating.
If you look at the sectoral composition of Indian economy, most of the sector do not need engineers. Tourism is 10% of the GDP, does not require engineers. Financial sector, trade, hotels and restaurants do not require engineers. Requirement in health, education, agriculture is almost negligible.
More than 50% of the GDP has no role for engineers in our country. Still most of us are becoming engineers. The current situation is not sustainable.
So the demand is less while the supply is high. Over and above this, skill level of an average engineer is poor. I say its non-existent. Leave the top 100–200 colleges. And you will find that a fresh engineer has no idea of what s/he has studies. Ask a fresh mechanical engineer, can s/he design a simple frame?
Today the situation is that most engineers are working in a field that has no connection to what they have studied in the college. This is a waste of resources.
Engineering degree does not come cheap. It costs about 5 to 10 lakhs. For poor parents, its a huge burden. When their son is not able to secure a job, they are devastated.
For the nation, you can calculate the loss. Leave around 1 lakh engineers that NASSCOM says are employable. The rest 14 lakhs have each wasted 10 lakhs of fees. That totals to around $ 20 Billion. Almost equal to the Government’s spending on healthcare. Over this, there is loss of human capital.
Parents and students need to think thrice before taking admission to engineering colleges.