Can you give me a source on this? One that compares the economic contribution of students from the next-10 colleges in India and finds it to be more than that of the IITs. Because otherwise, you're comparing different sample sizes and your statement becomes trivially true as a result.

> But by and large most IITs are largely places to train people, and send them to foreign countries.

Try looking up statistics of what % of students go abroad immediately after graduating from an IIT. Perhaps that might help you revisit this assertion.

> An argument could be made to spend this money to improve public schooling infrastructure in India.

The government's already spending 10x on that than they are on Higher Education. (2009) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_India#Budget How much would an extra 0.5x help.

> As of today, the total amount to be repaid is set at

> €21,000 for students who have chosen to join a government body for Year 4

> €31,000 for students who have not chosen to join a government body for Year 4

Such amount is not as insignificant in a country with high taxes and where peers in university have like $100/year tuition, it's not super high either (maybe 4-6 months of after tax salary for an entry level position)

But I didn't bother posting is as i think it's not relevant. IIT could set that amount at 1 rupee, or 1 lakh, or 1 crore. There's a threshold where this switches from "that's fair you're repaying tuition" to "oh now you're adding a steep penalty"

It's complex to set the right value: too high and you're forcing your graduates to choose a high paying job or a government job, but you're killing their chances of startup creation. Too low and IIT is leaving money on the table.

> IIT's have contributed very little or almost nothing to India.

I don't even know why I am biting but I guess someone has to point it out. I know it is fancy to sling mud on the IITian but last I checked (maybe a year ago), about 50% of my class went on to do higher studies. Out of that maybe half went on to obtain a PhD. A paltry 10% or so went into management. Others went for jobs...mostly in the product sector. Some did join service jobs but quit soon after and they went for a Masters too I think. About 5% of my class have started companies in India.

> Guy's at ISRO. Most of them are from small time colleges, and many with average marks and grades. Many probably don't even have an engineering degree, and probably have a diploma.

Just stop. Please. There are tiered requirements for Scientist categories. Pretty obvious if you check the newspaper ads.

> IIT's have contributed very little or almost nothing to India. Bulk of their students don't even work here. Modern India is the pretty the result of the sweat and blood of the ordinary college educated student.

Many have come back to join as faculty back in the IITs. You can pull up say IIT Elec department page and confirm yourself. A decade ago, it was our own faculty who encouraged us to step outside. Now, slowly, we are bringing in overseas culture within our own campuses.

* * *

But hey, you have already formed an opinion and composed an elegy. What I wrote above is not for you. It is for others to gather that you are factually incorrect.

Sorry these are precisely the kind of guys who end up being mid level managers in large corporates.

>>But when it comes around to getting a job, they are the ones who usually struggle.

Interview in India are a joke. Body shops pick up people for marks, and familiarity with objective questions roaming around on the internet.

This extremely vulgar expression of privilege on my part mainly offends what we would call the petit bourgeois here, where working people tend to find the lack of pretense a relief. This is the horror of being middle class anywhere, because it's living with the fear of exposure that we aren't really all that different from the people we were raised to hate.

Welcome, my Indian sisters and brothers! We are more alike than we ever knew. :)

Completely unrelated to IITs.

Situation there is even more worse. Most of them are job hoppers who hop job after job.

Most people from IITs I know don't even a single full project on their resume.

This is what happens when a reporter at a online publication of a quality between Buzzfeed and Slate writes a clickbait article on why an apex institution is destroying youth. Admission to the IITs is widely considered in India to writing a golden ticket in life. They can study abroad at virtually any university, get hired by multinationals in India or abroad etc. etc.

The points the reporter makes might be factually correct but are misguided and erroneous. This is not like students who don't study for the IITs get a more holistic education. Ask what exactly would the kids do if not study for the IITs? Workout, train physically, work with their hands on vocational skills? All these are either absent in Indian society or looked down upon.

The whole Indian system by virtue of demand >> supply due to 70 years of socialism/quais-communism is about state monopoly on education. Indian spend 10s of billions of dollars sending their children abroad for undergraduate and masters education because supply is so meagre. If your family is not wealthy then this is the only guaranteed way out, rather used to be, as things are slowly changing.

Hate to say this but there is also an element of sour grapes to the writer's lament - IIT graduates command social prestige, job opportunities and mating opportunities.

Now go write about how kids in the US work so hard to pass BUDS spend all their lives perfecting their physical endurance in detriment to their mind. Or the football players who devote all their energies to get noticed by college scouts. IIT's are no different just in a different realm. I would almost argue that the IIT exams are superior as they are atleast not damaging their body and wasting prime years of their lives not developing their minds.

> the kind of person targeting American undergraduate from India can afford to study IB+AP.

I dont get why the Indian government will spend millions on subsidizing and educating its students and then allowing them to migrate to USA - if that occurred in the USA there would be an uproar on why the government is using the tax-payers money to fund another country's workforce. Something the Indian tax-payer needs to think about, eh?

I recently attended the Ubuntu launch event at the Mumbai's IIT and Dr Phatak, who now heads India's cheap tablet project did a talk. To my surprise, there was not even one question from the audience of bright IIT students.

They also have poorly executed projects like "Spoken Tutorials" http://spoken-tutorial.org/ that were presented and it was all very depressing.

I would not expect good quality startups from IITs.

Expectable that it was the next stage of IIT rat race.

Each year almost 7000 teenagers are filtered out in India to be sent to IIT, the best place of all in India. At least 10% of these are supposed (or 'have the potential') to drive scientific, technical innovation in India. The present conditions at IIT are not at all encouraging in Research except Computer Science and Electrical mostly. The problems are many fold. One important problem is the faculty, except that of CS, lack a vision and passion for research. While CS, Elec profs have undergrad experience at IITs, it is not at all true for other departments like Physics. [Yup, I am from EP]. The profs are ones who had a B.Sc at some regional university and MTech and Phd at IIT. And I say CS students are not the ones who can contribute to the core Scientific Research. They drive Technological Innovations. But the research in CS is very 'volatile'. There is no sharing of Ideas in other departments as in CS. Ideas quickly spread in CS and give rise to better solutions to problems. But not so in medicine or physics. India already has a great 'research' contributions in CS. I myself has lost all the passion taking Physics as my professional career after coming here, and I am pursuing CS (which I was naturally able to connect, given it's mathematical nature, the first fav subj for any IITian). And I regret for loosing Physics. And there are so many friends in Physics, BioTech who had taken the dept in spite of good chances in other departments. And it is very essential to make use of these bright students for research. The IIT is the only bet for good research. Even if research is not directly produced at IIT, at least the conditions should be encouraging to instill the passion in students, before pumping money.

Students from IIT in India are filtered from millions of students. They only take about 10-15k students every year and the rest are in NIT and other relevant institutions (around 50k). About 1 million self selected students participate in jee-mains every year. I only meant to highlight that OP's friend may be biased compared to the common situation here.

Here is the article for chinese investment in top Indian startups - https://www.vccircle.com/here-s-a-snapshot-of-key-chinese-in...

With government trying to shut down foreign investment, I don't see investment opportunities in India increasing.

[1]: https://www.linkedin.com/in/argupta26