What's wrong with the IITs

(Written originally in 2024, mildly edited)

I've been teaching for 30 years at a top old IIT in a top-ranked department. I can confidently say that the best students I have witnessed were between c. 1995 and 2006. The ones from my vintage (mid 80s) and some years later have done quite well academically and as entrepreneurs. Several things have made things go down.

There are many poor decisions made at IITs due to incompetent, timid and unimaginative leadership, but in the past, the faculty's ability, personal contact with the students and above all, the students' enterprise together were able to maintain a high-enough standard that was the envy of even top departments in top universities across the globe. (At least at the undergrad level in the top departments of the old IITs). [A Turing award winner whom I hosted in 1997 confessed to me that he thought CMU had great undergrads, but after meeting about 20+ of my students said he would have to revise that opinion.]

First, the media played up IITs to the extent that the number of candidates writing the entrance exam became too large to handle with a "subjective exam". In the name of making JEE correction tractable, they went MCQ ("objective" only in that no one objects to it). What this meant was that questions became tests of speed, less analytical and creative (think Berkeley series Physics), and much more formulaic. Pattern-matching templates gave a huge fillip to the already huge and powerful coaching industry. Kota became a bigger problem than the so-called ills that everyone blamed on "quota".

The students we saw within IIT, except a few in the top ranks, tended to be burnt-out, and often had to be deschooled (qv Ivan Illich). The motivation changed -- parents invested in their children so that they could get huge pay packages. And the pay for select jobs kept going up. What the outside world, and the world of WhatsApp Uncles did not know or want to know, was that such high-paid jobs only came to a few. But the media and IITs' PR machines only bruited the top-line numbers.

JEE aspirant numbers swelled even more, and the exam became a filtering MCQ exam followed by an old-style test administered to a more manageable number. This would in time morph into an MCQ test followed by another MCQ test. However, even at this point both stages of JEE were managed by the IITs.]

Then came Arjun Singh and the 27% quota for OBCs (quickly modified to be OBC-Non Creamy Layer). Simultaneously many new IITs were established, only 2 of which have done quite well in their first 15 years: those at Hyderabad and Gandhinagar, both because of locational advantages and visionary first directors. To protect the number of general category students taken in, the overall intake went up by 54%. This increase was effected over a 3 year period, but it nevertheless had several deleterious effects on the IITs.

Among the many problems with the sudden increase were that these were not planned in terms of resources. The old IITs were looking to invest in research programmes (and more high-quality PhDs). Instead they were doubly saddled with an increase in class sizes in their own institute (without concomitant hostel and classroom facilities) as well as teaching and mentoring duties in the new IITs.  

The situation with the new IITs was worse. Typically, the HRD bureaucrats did the ass-backwards thing of enrolling students first, then slowly hiring a director, then worrying about curricula, and then planning a campus, and then hiring faculty. There is another problem that is more touchy to discuss, and that is the distribution of students being taken in due to the nature of quotas. [This deserves a separate post]. The main problem is not the usually articulated "fairness" issue, which is just voicing upper caste privilege, but rather that an increasing number of students being selected are less and less prepared for a college education compared with their peers who have had many more privileges during their schooling years. (And given that IIT is now a "brand name" that can vault them to a much higher salary level, these less privileged group will never even consider foregoing the opportunities... and why should they?) The IIT faculty have scarcely recognised these huge changes in the intake, and not been able to modify their expectations or their approach in teaching. It is hard to change course, it is hard to change courses; it is hard to correct courses, it is hard to course-correct.

The pressures that these relatively disadvantaged students face (many are first generation college students, many come from modest backgrounds, and their parents and families have bet the bank on them) are huge, and the cause for many to suffer anxiety and depression.

Worse was to come. JEE's popularity had so distorted school education that many (well-meaning) activists decided that the school system could only be reformed by changing JEE. This narrow interventionist approach seemed to ignore societal obsessions, media stories of the huge salaries from international companies (mainly financial, information technology, and consultancies), the IIT "brand" story, the dwindling growth in high-paying technical jobs across different industries, and that schooling was deteriorating for other reasons.

Kapil Sibal's tenure brought more turmoil, when he proposed that Class XII exams would be given due weightage in the selection process. The JEE "mains" examination was taken out of IITs' purview (they anyway lacked the ability to run the exam at the new scale) and only JEE advanced (itself a far too big MCQ exam) remained in their domain.

Then came Mr Modi's EWS quota (EWS qualification was then pegged at Rs 8 lakh max salary of the parents) ostensible of 10%, but which translates to a 25% increase in student intake, to protect the number of general category students. The EWS quota is also perversely interpreted -- as non-SC, non-ST, non-OBC-NCL students. This was also accompanied by many more new IITs (now 23), and also a supernumerary intake of women students so that they form 20% of the undergrad population. From a societal perspective, each of these steps may be unexceptionable, in fact the stated objectives are laudable. But expanding good education and making it accessible to the relatively disadvantaged is perhaps not best achieved by thrusting it onto a few well-performing institutions that are struggling to keep pace with the top universities in the world (due to lack of funds, and a disastrous nipping, by the likes of MM Joshi during his tenure as HRD Minister, of alumni endowments for the IITs. Remember Bharat Shiksha Kosh, wound up in 2004 with a teeny corpus?)

The current malaise in the IIT systems is largely because of venal, spineless and pliable directors, who kowtow to the ministry, and allow all manner of third-rate bureaucrats dictate policy to them. Their role during the pandemic generally was unimaginative at the most charitable, to bordering on criminally negligent (if one takes a harsh look at their decisions). Anything to stay popular with the bureaucracy and political leadership for their next posting. And to appease a less motivated, less self-aware student body -- that believes, without any basis ,that they are the smartest people in the country, if not on the planet. But who can blame the students, when a nation of 1.5 billion is forced to take advice on how to excel in education from those who have barely passed an exam? Or have failed many times, and peddle dubious theories and advice daily.