Foreign Academics Question the Quality of Their Countries' Engineering
Programs
By PAUL MOONEY and SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
Beijing and New Delhi
The Chronicel of Higher Education
http://chronicle.comSection: [屏蔽] & Politics
Volume 53, Issue 3, Page A20 =
A cartoon in Fortune magazine last year summed up one of the factors driving the push for the U.S. government to help educate more scientists and engineers: a muscular China is standing on a beach, pushing a skinny Uncle Sam around in the sand. "Is the U.S. a 97- Pound Weakling?" the headline read.
The growing number of scientists and engineers being educated in China and India has raised fears in the United States that those countries may take the lead in the production of high-technology jobs. But talk to some university scientists and engineers in those countries and a different picture emerges. Those scientists view American universities as the Charles Atlas and offer blunt talk about the need to strengthen the quality of their own graduates for global economic competition.
"Don't go by quantity" of Indian graduates, "because the quality of engineers decreases rapidly when you go beyond the top-tier institutes," says P.V. Indiresan, former director of the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras. "The standards are low, the faculty is bad, and the training is terrible. We have spread ourselves too thin."
There's no sign that China will pose a serious economic challenge to the United States in the near future, says Fang Shi-min, an American- trained molecular biologist based in Beijing and a frequent commentator on higher education in China. He blames the problems facing the Chinese education system on the rapidly increasing number of students admitted each year.
"There are simply too many students, and the resources, such as faculty and facilities, are over-stretched," he says. "It's not uncommon for a professor to mentor more than 40 graduate students at the same time, which means there is virtually no mentoring at all."
Examining the Numbers
The Fortune article reported that a major gap was developing: In 2004 China produced 640,000 undergraduate engineers, compared with 350,000 in India and just 70,000 in the United States. Those numbers have been repeated by members of Congress and in an influential report by the National Academies.
But when people looked at the numbers closely, they painted a less- threatening picture. The Chinese and Indian numbers included many holders of three-year degrees and, for China, possibly some auto mechanics, according to a December report by faculty members and students at Duke University, titled "Framing the Engineering Outsourcing Debate: Placing the United States on a Level Playing Field With China and India."
When the Duke authors examined only baccalaureate degrees in engineering, computer science, and information technology — the people most likely to do basic research and product development — the American output exceeded India's. And on a per-capita basis, the American level was more than 50 percent higher than China's and four times that of India.
Many academic and business leaders in China and India consistently say in interviews that, despite rapid growth in enrollment and graduates, many degree holders lack English-language and other business skills needed to work for multinational corporations that are moving technical jobs overseas or for homegrown companies that might compete with the United States economically.
An increasing number of employers in China are beginning to ask "embarrassing questions" about the quality of education, said Tu Shandong, vice president of the East China University of Science and Technology, in Shanghai, at a meeting of engineering educators last month. Employers have complained that graduates lack professional knowledge and teamwork skills.
Those concerns were underscored in a report last year by McKinsey & Company, an international management-consulting company, titled "China's Looming Talent Shortage." The report plays down the possibility of China's becoming a giant in offshore information- technology and business services. It argues that only 10 percent of Chinese job candidates, on average, would be suitable to work in a multinational company in nine categories studied, including engineering, accounting, finance, and life sciences.
Educators blame those shortcomings partly on the explosive growth in enrollment. Total numbers of Chinese university students hit 16 million last year, up from just 3.4 million in 1998, the year before the government began forcing universities to sharply increase their enrollments.
Many students in engineering and computer science complain that they have gained little practical knowledge in college, Mr. Fang says, and that they and their advisers are preoccupied with churning out research papers — which he says are poorly produced — to meet university requirements,.
Graduate students in China receive small stipends of about 300 yuan, or $38, a month, which forces them to take part-time jobs off campus that interfere with their research and studies, he adds.
The best students continue to go to the United States for graduate studies, and the majority do not return to China, Mr. Fang says. "The brain drain is still a serious problem," he says.
High-Tech Dreams in India
India's engineering enrollments have also skyrocketed as corporations have outsourced software-design and other engineering jobs here. This year India's 1,346 officially recognized engineering colleges enrolled around 440,000 students. In 1998 there were only 60,000 seats.
But those bullish figures obscure fundamental weaknesses in India's engineering programs. Only about 4,000 of this year's graduates were from the seven branches of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, which have won praise internationally for producing global leaders. Not more than 150 of the remaining institutions are of good quality, says researcher Premchand Palety, chief executive of the Centre for Forecasting and Research, which does an annual ranking of Indian engineering schools.
A separate report by McKinsey found that only 25 percent of Indian engineers can compete successfully for technology jobs outsourced from the United States. Despite nearly insatiable demand from information-technology companies and other booming industries, India has close to a million unemployed engineering graduates.
Nevertheless, the demand for engineering degrees is predicted to grow, reflecting societal expectations, says C.N.R. Rao, science adviser to India's prime minister.
In India, "all parents want their children to be engineers," he says. "They will send them to just any engineering college, even if it doesn't have proper infrastructure or faculty."
Already, there is a severe faculty shortage at most second-tier colleges, and even the Indian Institutes of Technology are beginning to feel the heat.
"Most of the IIT's have 25- to 30-percent faculty vacancies, and a lot of faculty are going to retire over the next few years," says Pradeep Gupta, a 1975 graduate of IIT-Delhi and chairman of PanIIT, an umbrella alumni organization. Mr. Palety says that people increasingly prefer to take private-sector jobs because they perceive greater opportunities for career and salary advancement.
For that reason, Mr. Gupta says that IIT alumni are working closely with the institutes to create private financing for academic positions to make teaching more attractive.
Corporations are also spending money and taking steps to plug gaps in the educational system. Infosys Technologies Limited, one of India's largest information-technology-services companies, has formed partnerships with 248 engineering colleges for a program called Campus Connect, to better align curriculum and teaching with industry needs.
The company has also committed $176-million to triple the capacity of its Global Education Centre, in Mysore, which Nandan M. Nilekani, co- founder and chief executive of Infosys, calls a corporate university.
"We are making up for gaps in the education system," Mr. Nilekani says. "The curriculum is not up to date, and students don't have access to the latest technologies."
Indian and Chinese academics agree that their institutions have a long way to go.
"There is a big difference between whether India 'could' be a serious competitor to the U.S. in technology and whether it 'would' be," says Mr. Indiresan, the former director of IIT-Madras. "At this rate, I think it wouldn't be. If the quality of all these thousands of graduates improved to be on par with graduates from the top-tier institutes, only then could it be considered a serious competitor."
中印学者质疑他们国家的工程教学
PAUL MOONEY and SHAILAJA NEELAKANTAN
美国《高等教育纪事报》2006年9月8日
去年《财富》[屏蔽]的一幅漫画概括了促使美国G0vern.ment去帮助培养更多的科学家和工程师的一个因素：健壮的中国站在沙滩上，在沙中任意摆布瘦得皮包骨的山姆大叔，标题是：“美国是一个97磅的瘦弱者吗？”
中国和印度正在培养出越来越多的科学家和工程师，这在美国引起了恐惧，担心这些国家会在培养高科技人才方面领先。但是与这些国家的一些大学科学家和工程师交谈后，人们会见到一幅不同的景象。那些科学家把美国大学视为查尔斯·阿特拉斯（美国最著名的健美运动员），直言为了全球性经济竞争，有必要提高他们自己的毕业生的质量。
“不要只看印度毕业生的数量，因为除了那些从顶尖学院毕业的，工程师的质量每下愈况，”马德拉斯印度理工学院前院长P.V.Indiresan说。“标准很低，教员很次，训练很遭。我们已出现贪多嚼不烂的情况。”
曾在美国接受分子生物学的训练、现在北京的方市民（方舟子）经常评论中国的高等教育问题，他说目前并无迹象表明中国在近期内将会对美国构成严重的经济挑战。他把中国教育制度的问题归咎于年复一年迅速增加的招生数量。
“学生人数实在是太多了，像教员和教学设备这些资源不堪重负。”他说。“一名教授同时指导40多名研究生的情形并不罕见，这意味着实际上没有任何指导。”
《财富》报告说一条鸿沟正在扩大：2004年中国培育出了64万名工程本科毕业生，而印度为35万名，美国则仅有7万名。国会议员以及美国科学院的一份很有影响的报告也都重复了这组数字。
但是如果人们更仔细地看一下这组数字，会发现它们展示的图景并不那么有威胁。据杜克大学的师生在12月份发布的报告《工程工作外包争议的框架：把美国放在与中国和印度的同一水平的赛场》，中国和印度的数字包括许多3年专科毕业生，而对中国来说，可能还包括一些汽车机工。
当杜克大学的研究人员只研究工程、计算机科学和信息技术的学士学位获得者的情况时——这些人最有可能从事基础研究和产品开发——美国的数量超过了印度。而按人口平均，美国要比中国高出50％以上，是印度的4倍。
许多中国和印度的学者和商界领袖在访谈中一直在说，尽管入学和毕业人数在迅速增长，许多学位获得者缺乏英语和其他商务能力，这些能力是要为正把技术工作移到海外的跨国公司或能与美国进行经济方面的竞争的国内公司工作所必需的。
上海华东理工大学副校长涂善东在上个月工程教师的一个会议上说，越来越多的中国雇主开始对教育质量提“令人难堪的问题”。雇主们抱怨说研究生缺乏专业知识和从事团队工作的能力。
国际管理咨询公司麦肯锡在去年的一份报告《中国人才危机迫在眉睫》强调了这些问题。该报告认为中国正在成为海外信息技术产业和商业服务的巨人的可能性不大。它论证说，平均只有10％的中国求职者适合于在该报告研究的9种类型的跨国公司工作，包括工程、会计、金融和生命科学。
教育人员把这些缺点部分地归咎于招生人数的膨胀。去年中国大学生总数达到1千6百万，而在1998年只有3百40万，1998年之后中国G0vern.ment开始迫使大学迅速增加招生。
方先生说，许多工程和计算机科学的学生抱怨说他们在大学里很少学到有实用价值的知识，他们及其导师为了应付学校的要求把主要精力用于炮制粗制滥造的论文。
他补充说，中国的研究生的补贴很低，一个月只有大约300元人民币，合38美元，这迫使他们要到校外打工，干扰了研究和学习。
方先生说，中国最好的学生继续前往美国读研究生，其中多数人不会回国。“人才流失仍然是一个严重的问题。”他说。
随着国外企业把软件设计和其他工程业务外包给印度，印度工程学生的入学人数也迅猛增长。今年印度官方认可的1346所工学院录取了44万名学生。1998年仅录取了6万名。
但是这些上涨的数字掩盖了印度工程课程的根本弱点。因培育出全球领袖而在国际上享有盛誉的印度理工学院的7所分校今年只有大约4千名毕业生。剩下的学校中，质量好的不超过150所，每年对印度工程学院进行排名的预测与研究中心的主任Premchand Palety说。
麦肯锡公司的另一份报告发现只有25％的印度工程师能够成功地竞争从美国外包的技术工作。尽管信息技术公司和其他繁荣企业对人才的需求几乎永难满足，但是印度还是有近百万名工程毕业生失业。
不过，对工程学位的需求预计还会增长，这反映了社会期望，印度总理科学顾问C.N.R. Rao说。
在印度，“所有的父母都想让他们的孩子成为工程师，”他说。“他们会送他们去任何一所工学院，即使它没有合适的基础设施和教员。”
多数二流的学院已经出现了严重的教员短缺，甚至印度理工学院也开始面临这个问题。
“多数印度理工学院有25％到30％的教师职务空缺，而许多教师在以后几年内会退休，”德里印度理工学院1975年毕业生和印度理工学院校友会主席 Pradeep Gupta说。Palety先生说人们越来越喜欢接受私营机构的工作，因为他们觉得在那里职业更有发展前景，也容易获得提薪。
Gupta先生说，因为这个原因，印度理工学院校友会正在与印度理工学院密切合作，为学术职务创造私人赞助的机会，让教学变得更有吸引力。
企业也愿意花钱，采取措施填补教育体制的疏漏。印度最大的信息技术服务公司之一Infosys Technologies Limited已经和248个工学院合作举办一个叫Campus Connet的教学项目，以便让课程和教学更好地满足企业的需要。
该公司也保证将出资1亿7千6百万美元三倍地扩大其位于Mysore的全球教育中心的容量，Infosys的共同创建者和首席执行官Nandan M. Nilekani将它称之为一所企业大学。
“我们正在填平教育体制中的漏洞，”Nilekani先生说，“其课程过时了，学生没有接触到最新的技术。”
印度和中国的学者都同意他们的大学还有很长的路要走。
“印度是否‘能够’成为美国在技术方面的严重竞争者，和是否‘将会’成为，这二者有重大区别。”马德拉斯印度理工学院前院长Indiresan先生说。“按这个速度，我想它将不会。如果所有这些几千名毕业生的质量都能提高到与顶尖学院的毕业生同一档次，只有那个时候它才能被当成是一个严重的竞争者。”
（方舟子译）
