Tamilnadu's Impending Crisis: How Engineering Education Impacts Tamil Society

 Hello World,

Engineering is easily one of the most sought after career choices for people of Tamilnadu and thanks to the hundreds of engineering colleges, engineering education is now practically Class XIII. With approximately 1.5 lakh engineering seats opening up every year, we have accumulated lakhs of engineering graduates in Tamilnadu. Unfortunately not all of them are employed and amongst those who are, most of them are employed outside their respective engineering streams (which they graduated in).

This unemployment issue for engineering graduates is a persisting issue and for decades, the popular opinion merely blames the students and graduates for not taking efforts to improve themselves. Nobody seems to consider the idea of job creation and fair hiring practices. The concept of relevant engineering education is pretty much a unicorn that doesn't exist. The engineering syllabi is outdated and what the students learn in their college is light years away from what they end up doing on their jobs after graduation.

Over the years, this has created social game layer where lakhs of unemployed or irrelevantly employed engineering graduates have become the source of the overall societal mentality. This does sound outlandish to me but having followed this being an insider for over a decade, I can confirm that this is true. We are creating soldiers for an army that never fought a war in a country that has nothing to be protected besides the growing army of insignificant soldiers. What Tamilnadu faces as a consequence is a complex state of intra-societal conflict built on the sufferings of the unemployed and irrelevantly employed engineering graduates.

Here is a conversation with Alaguraj Vellaiappan, Founder of Mach Engineers, Coimbatore, where we explore the different sides of the engineering education crisis (a conversation in Tamil):

 

Best regards,