Thursday, September 21, 2006

Brand IIT, quota raj & David Fagiano

Brand IIT can coexist with quota raj : David Fagiano

With due respect Mr. Fagiano, your argument that IIT's are second to none in the country and hence the brand name will not be diluted because of quota raj is flawed.

IITs are not competing with any Indian tech school for their existence. They belong to stature of Ivy league and when we talk of brand dilution its with respect to Ivy league and not with respect to some unknown institute of Tamil Nadu who offers close to 80% reservation. Please let me know if MIT or CMU or Stanford or any one for that matter gives admit on bases of merit or something else?

Extending your logic Mr. Fagiano, when you were COO at Dale Carnegie, did you recruited a person on his merit or because his forefathers has faced discrimination in US. Its very competitive out here making it survival of fittest. We definitely appreciate your concern about the so called socially backwards of India, but the solution is not enrolling them into IITs but it would be making them eligible to get into IITs themselves. A person with crutches will never be able to run!

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

All US institutions-yes, that includes MIT, Harvard and the likes-have something known as affirmative action. Underrepresented minorities are accepted with lower test scores. While it is not based on caste as it is going to be in the IITs/IIMs, the reasoning is the same.

Right or wrong-that depends on which race, gender, and in the case of Indians-caste, you belong to!

While this (reservation in colleges) itself seems unpalatable to some, don't know how it is going to be received when it is extended to corporate India.

Corporate America-including IBM, Google-have affirmative action policies in place and have accepted it and might eventually make its way to India.

Unknown said...

Mr. Fagiano... looks like there is trouble in your own backyard. A regular writer at Wall Street Journal Daniel Golden has written a book - “The Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges—and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates”. It talks about the backdoor reservation of "dumb wards of elites" into ivy league universities.

Check out the Economist article http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=7945858

Unknown said...

Hello Mr. Anonymous!

There is a difference between affirmative action and reservation. The difference of intention.

Affirmative action is based on notion to help a person grow. He would have received similar schooling but is under-represented in university due to multitude of reason. Affirmative action is to create a social balance so that all communities can grow.

Reservation on the other hand is stinking with caste based vote bank politics. There is no genuine interest on part of Mr. Arjun Singh to do any social justice. Its only a mockery of poor by allowing some elites of so called OBC caste to take away a big chunk of available seats in elite education institutes. The people worthy of such "affirmative action" are deprived on even primary education. How will they ever come up?

Anonymous said...

As you say, the objective in both countries is the same. Do the right people benefit? Probably yes and probably no.

Another reason why people are upset is lack of adequate top rated institutions.

A country like the US with 1/4 the population of India has, easily, 50 institutions that are top class whereas 100,000 Indian 12th standard students graduating in 2007 still compete for the same number of places that, probably, their parents competed for (5-7 colleges that people die to get into). Now is that not a shame.

If 250 million Americans have 50 good colleges to look forward to, applying the same logic, Indians will need atleast 200.

If there were 25 ISBs in India, which is possible and needed, IIM A might get the short shrift and people would not care if they had affirmative action or not!

I am getting side tracked here, but the point is when we have only little of the good thing to pass around, such things become emtionally charged to the ones affected.

Anyway interesting blog, congratulations on getting that MBA from ISB.

Anonymous said...

I congratulated a little early, thought that you were done with your MBA. Good luck with the program.

Unknown said...

Mr. Anonymous

Thanks!

Well back getting to the point, the issue of reservation is redistribution of the same pie which is already very small. Doing this govt Will do no good but will only increase caste system as pie would be taken away for one set of people and would hardly reach another set.

The way of looking at this issue would be to increase the pie. As you have said that India needs 200 good quality institutes then you see there would be aplenty for everyone and no need of reservation. People would be able to choose to what they want.

Anonymous said...

Wow, you guys have a lot of time on your hands. Lighten up there Ghandi!