A curiously large gap in engineering eduction
I graduated from IIT Bombay and none of my batchmates would have been hired by Peter Beck. Peter is the founder of the space startup Rocket Lab. He requires aspiring employees “…to perform an engineering test like analyzing a circuit board or building a pump over the course of several hours.”* Most of my batchmates, me included, could not have even begun building a pump. Things have gotten slightly better since my time (1993) but there is still a curiously large gap in the curriculum of one of the most sought after professional degrees in the country. We graduate engineers who cannot make anything. What is this all about?
Let’s begin with the fact that most of the students studying engineering end up not using what they are taught. Informal estimates suggest that the percentage of graduates who take the so-called ‘core engineering’ jobs may be as low as 20%! It is certainly less than 50%. Think about it. From a batch of 100 Civil or Mechanical Engineers, only 20 may be actually using what they learned from their professors. Why is this so?
Jobs in consulting, data analysis, software, Artificial Intelligence and finance pay much more than jobs in core engineering. Additionally, many (most?) core engineering jobs do not challenge the intellectual capabilities of the graduates, at least in the initial years. Naturally, the pay and the prestige of core engineering jobs is much lesser than that of many other jobs. The result is that students are not interested in engineering and hence making stuff. If you know that you are going to be consulting or programming food delivery apps after your four years of engineering college, why would you build anything? The urge to build is reduced further because students have many alternatives for use of their time.
IITs, and many other engineering colleges, are residential programs. For most students, it is their first exposure to independent living. It takes time to learn how to live with this increased freedom and responsibility. In IITs a new world of distraction opens up with excellent facilities for sports, drama and many other activities. And this when they are of the age where they are deeply concerned with attracting a mate. All these activities, and thinking about the activities, may leave very little mental space for students to actually make something.
But why do professors not teach students to build stuff? After all, they teach students years of dense engineering theory in the face of the same disinterest. The first reason is that it is much easier to teach theory than to teach students how to build things. A professor can stand in front of a class of 100s of students and deliver a lecture to all of them. You cannot do this when students are building things. Every student would have unique needs. This is a challenge of ‘Learning by Doing’.
I teach Improv theater and it is all learning by doing and no theory. To be effective I need to understand each individual. This limits the number of students I can teach at a time. At least my students are (mostly) motivated unlike many engineering students. Engineering institute professors would have to not only have to help solve the difficulties of individual students, but also motivate them individually. This is almost impossible in large batches which are the norm now. The large batches create another challenge.
Facilities have not necessarily kept pace with the increased student intake in engineering colleges. Especially in places like IITB, space becomes a constraint. It is relatively easier to hire faculty and staff than it is to create spaces where students can make stuff. Space is not the only issue, rigid rules can be as big a challenge.
Imagine a student who gets engrossed in making a fibre optic controlled drone after reading about its use in the Russia Ukraine conflict. Halfway through he realises that he needs a new machine or even some components. Institutional procedures could make him wait for months. As this post on X shows, even professors may be powerless in such situations.
The large batch sizes, need for individual attention and difficulties related to space and procurement would mean that it takes much more effort for a professor to get students to make something. A professor making this kind of effort knows that this extra effort may not help his career.
Top institutes are both research and teaching institutes. In such places, both prestige and promotion is linked more strongly with publications than it is with practical engineering. Also, quantity may be valued more than quality. These incentives for the professors flow from the incentives for the institutes.
The National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) is supposed to be the report card presented by engineering colleges (and other educational institutes) to the nation. Here is the input for the rankings presented by the number one ranked institute in India, IIT Madras. The first thing you would notice is that the inputs are mainly quantitative — for example, number of students, number of faculty, the amount spent on creating infrastructure, etc. The data on research performance is taken from databases like Scopus or Web of Science. Much has been written about the quality and relevance of research in IITs (for example this) and I won’t go deep into it here. For our purposes, it is sufficient to know that a professor is much more likely to benefit if he publishes a paper — any paper — rather than if his students make something. Even if what the students make is something remarkable.
An additional challenge for the institutes is that there is a lot of theory to teach. For example, a mechanical engineering course would be expected to teach thermodynamics, heat transfer, structures, fluid dynamics. That is not all. The real world has left the old silos behind. Mechatronics, for example, combines mechanical and electronics engineering and computer science. There is indeed a lot to learn. However, to me this seems a strong argument for getting students to make rather than teaching them theory.
If we agree that there is a lot of theory for any engineer to learn, shouldn’t we teach them how to learn whatever they need rather than try the impossible task of teaching them ‘everything they might need’? Let us go back to Peter Beck* to illustrate the benefit of learning by doing.
The New Zealand born entrepreneur grew up in a house that had a large workshop. As a fourteen year old, Peter built a ‘super sturdy aluminium mountain bike’. At the age of fifteen, Peter bought a beat up Morris Mini car and fully refurbished it. At sixteen, he decided not to go to college and took up a job at an appliance maker instead. There he learned precision tool and die making. At the age of seventeen, while working at this job, Peter started a side project of building a rocket engine. He also decided that the rocket would run on hydrogen peroxide.
Hydrogen Peroxide is a dangerous chemical in high concentrations and for his rocket to work, Peter had to take the concentrations up to a very high level. He built the equipment to distill the fuel at his home. He abandoned the idea of this fuel only after many mini accidents and near mishaps. His eventual rocket powered bike beat a very fast car in a race.
Peter’s interest in rockets continued. His company Rocket Labs was launched from New Zealand and it became the second private company after SpaceX to send satellites to space. Peter’s story is a great example of learning theory as and when it was needed in building something.
Some examples,
Early on, when building his Morris Mini at the age of sixteen, Peter had to learn about engines. His method?
“I learned how to do most of it from books and talking to people,” he said. “An engine is not that complicated when you boil it down to basics.”
“When he began building his own rocket engine, he read the ‘classics of the field, like Rocket Propulsion Elements’. He also mined the internet for scientific papers and took advantage of NASA’s rather generous archives of technical documentation and manuals.”
Learning by doing is one of the two ways of learning a complex field like engineering and Peter Beck is clear about which of the two ways he prefers.
“There are two ways you can learn,” Beck said, “You can go to a university and be taught shaft breaking, or you can go to industry and have a shaft break. At university, the major consequence is a poor grade. The consequences in a factory are the production lines stopping, so they are much bigger.”
But that was Peter Beck. How many Peter Becks are there in an engineering batch? That is, how many people would learn much better if they were actually making things rather than sitting in a class learning theory? To answer these questions I talked to a few of my batchmates who stuck to engineering and who have done very well. I got a range of answers. On one end was a chemical engineer who believed that he learnt engineering only after a few years of job when he was forced to revive a mothballed plant. At the other end was a current Chief Technology Officer of a robotics company who believes that the first principles education he learned at IIT was extremely valuable. However, all of them agreed that at some stage in their career, they had to do hands-on stuff. If engineering institutes started graduating some students who already had experience of making things, it could be a game changer.
I believe that India has a unique opportunity to get its manufacturing right. There are signs that we are capitalising on this opportunity, at least in mass manufacturing. However, if India has to move beyond mass manufacturing into creating world class products and even creating new technology, it would need its ‘core engineers’ to be trained in the best way possible. Not only that, it is possible that the ‘20%’ that stick to ‘core engineering’ may go up by a few percentage points. Especially in IITs, the theory heavy curriculum can put off many people from engineering. For many, engineering education has no connection to the reality around them. Even if the students that ‘make’ don’t take up core jobs, it is a positive. They will be better professionals wherever they are. For the 20%+ who do stick to core engineering, engineers that could make new drones or get into rocket technology or repair a pump could change the course of our country.
So how can the institutes overcome the dual challenges of uninterested students and professors preferring theory because they are both positively and negatively incentivised to do so? Are the structural constraints too difficult to overcome? Remarkably enough the answer is no. Some solutions have been found.
Maker spaces have come up in engineering institutes (and outside) across the country. Not only do these provide a space and basic equipment for interested students but also they are places to meet like minded people. These spaces are designed to be welcoming of students who are interested in ‘tinkering’.
Encouragement for doing hands-on-engineering also comes from programs such as Invent@IIT. This contest gathers students from all over India and gets them to imagine solutions to everyday problems. The students are helped to make working prototypes which demonstrate the validity of their solution. In my mentoring in these programs, I have seen students come up with solutions ranging from better coconut scrapers to a device to help cure clubfoot for children.
IITs themselves have courses in which students are required to make. For example, IITB uses the maker space in the campus to get all first year students to make interesting products like basic robots. This is an enormous step forward. It still leaves a lot on the table as this gets students to work on a puzzle rather than what they would encounter in real life.
One of the limitations of most formal education is that it teaches people to solve puzzles. Puzzles are well defined problems with clear boundaries. Puzzles also have one right solution. Think of Rubik’s cube. Real life problems are very different. They are ill defined. When starting on them, we may not know of all the constraints. There may or may not be a solution that satisfies all the constraints. Think what it took to make Rubik’s cube a successful product. The business would have had to figure out which material to use, which manufacturing process to use, how to sell the product, how to comply with regulations and even which regulations to comply with all the while making sure that their cost is less than the income they make from sales. A challenge which is exponentially tougher than solving the cube. I have covered this issue in detail here. The making course in IIT is much more close to a puzzle than it is to a real life situation. More importantly, there is a worrying sign running through all of the above positive news.
Whether it is maker spaces or it is programs like Invent@IIT, they are all coming from ‘outside the system’. As far as I know, maker spaces have been funded by Alumni. Contests, including global contests, don’t have too much to do with the administrators of IITs. I understand that even the maker course at IIT is run out of Alumni funded maker spaces. The picture I get is that most of the making that happens in various institutes happens despite the institutes. It may require a few professors to put in heroic efforts.
Making or Learning by Doing is a fundamentally different way of learning and perhaps the biggest reason our institutes do not embrace it is because ‘they have never done it this way.’ Inertia is one of the concepts I learned while preparing for the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE). The principle of inertia can be restated as ‘Any institute will continue to do things the way it has already done, unless a very large external force acts on it.’
So what is the solution? I have no solutions as I don’t know enough of the compulsions of the institutes and the Ministry of Education. I don’t even have advice. I only have words of encouragement.
- If you are a student at an engineering institute, I urge you to make something. Anything. Take the project to completion. Do this even if you do not plan to stick to ‘core engineering’. Trust me, this will help you immensely in any career that you choose to take up.
- If you are an alumnus of an engineering institute, please find a way to mentor students who are learning by doing. I say that while fully knowing how frustrating it would be. The institute will get in the way or at best be indifferent. The student will get distracted. But it would be worthwhile if you help develop even one excellent professional. If you are one of the alumni who is funding maker spaces, please continue doing it. The results of your efforts will take time to come about but when they do, they will be spectacular.
- If you are a professor who cares for the excellence of your students, I salute you. If you help your students make, then I salute you twice. Perhaps, you could find a way to make ‘making’ sexy at IITs?
If you are the dean and director of an institute or someone in the ministry of education, I urge you to think long and hard about how you could create a making culture at engineering institutes. Do you have the ability to be the force that counteracts the inertia? Do you have the bravery?
Heartfelt thanks to the alumni, professors and students that talked to me on this topic. Your time and experience is deeply appreciated.
*The information and quotes on Peter Beck are from the book When Heavens went on Sale by Ashlee Vance. I recommend the book.
This article is part of the series — Tips for early / mid career analytical types.
“How to spot a bad expert” in this series has received a lot of attention.
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