#342 Andrew Thangaraj: The $5,000 IIT Degree: Can India Fix Its Broken Education System?

0:00Losing their childhood just for getting into college and then your brain is not developed properly. What do you do after college? That's a big question. After five years, looking back, looking at all the numbers, looking at where the students are coming out, I think we've really created a low-cost, highly scalable, very high-quality, vigorous undergraduate degree program, which I think is the need of the AR at the country. He didn't have a way back. It's not easy in India to do these things. And he took this program. He did so well in it. His CG is so high, you wouldn't believe. Then he wrote this great exam.

0:27I'm adopted. Now he's doing M-Tech in AI and Indian Institute of Science. So his career and life have changed. I think it's very possible. I'm very good. I think we have the right people system at this point. My name is Andrew. I'm with Anganaj. As I just met earlier, I'm a faculty here in the electrical engineering department at IIT Midwest. I did my bachelor's here for my day back in 98. After that, I did a PhD from Georgia Tech in Atlanta in 2003. And then I did a year of postdoc in France. And then I got back here as faculty. So 2004, I've been faculty here for nearly more than 20 years. Yeah, actually, and that's interesting because one of the things I've been talking to people about is one of the problems that I've had is that people go abroad for their PhD and they never come back.

1:17And so the IITs are thinly peopleed by qualified people. Yes, the IITs are okay. They lastly go okay. So maybe I think given my introduction, then I think you also asked a very relevant question about how institutes in India find faculty. So if you look at how higher education works in India, it's a very interesting spread of things. So the IITs are few in number, about 23 today. A large number of students do not go to IITs. So every year, about two and a half crores. I'm going to say in crores, I think you should convert two million. so down to two and a half more kids come of college going age every year and about 87-90 lakh actually get to college.

2:03So that's our enrollment ratio is about 27 % or so today. The southern states do much better. 50 plus, Kamil Nado is 56, Kerala is close to 60. Then if you go to the northern states they're really there. So a lot of kids don't go to college and even among the 90 lakh that goes to 1 lakh is like 100 ,000 and one crore is 10 million. So 90 lakh is like 900. Yeah, 900. Kids go to college and IITs every year take only you know 17 ,000, 18 ,000. That's right. And even if you look at after IITs, what? Right. So then you have the NITs, the Institutes of National Importance together. Even they don't take that many.

2:49The number only comes to 50 ,000. That's right. So a large number of students end up going to small institutions which we call colleges. We call them colleges. They're not universities. They're affiliated to universities. That's how India works in higher education. The big name, well-reputed, good institutions are few in number. And secondly, because they're few in number, they're either seriously competitive for getting admission or they are very expensive. Now, once it becomes fiercely competitive, that is also an expense. You have a lot of money to get there. So today, any education today in India is you want a good, reputed college to give you an undergraduate degree.

3:35It's really, really expensive. So in our terms, you would say at least 25, 30 lakhs is what you spend. A lot of lakhs, you keep converting. I'm talking in rupees. So that's pretty high for India. So, and a lot of interesting other things are there. Even though IITs take very few undergraduate students, they are very heavily funded by the ministry. Ministry funds the IITs very heavily. So all this was okay. It was going on for quite a while, but then they reached different stages of economic growth. In the 90s, we boomed through IT and all that and a lot of colleges, a lot more colleges came up for engineering particularly.

4:13And then now I think there is the second sort of stage where maybe AI and data science and ML are going to dominate and we need many more engineers who know how to deploy these systems, understand these systems, etc. So that seems to be the next stage that we are at. So maybe at this point, there is an opportunity for the AITs to deliver a program that maybe is not so expensive. When I say expensive, both in terms of the competition, the intense competition that students go through, the intense competition itself, if you look at Kota, for example, in even other places which are worse than Kota, in some sense, It's become very inhuman in some sense.

4:53Really competitive students are losing their childhood. And then just for getting into college, and then your brain is not developed properly. And what do you do after college? That's a big question mark. So we really wanted to break this childhood we have because of numbers and resources and limitations. And can we do a full-slash-UG degree for under 5 ,000 ,000? that's like under$5 ,000. Can we do a good, highly reputed, good quality UG degree? The students who come out are really skillful, employable, they're going to go out and make a name for themselves, put the IIT brand behind it. So you can do a very low cost degree and not put a heavy brand behind it.

5:38So can you put the IIT brand behind it and still deliver a$5 ,000, less than 5 lakh, let's say, right, degree in India? is that possible or not? It was a great question that came up four, five, six years ago. And a bunch of us, just me that I'm talking about, a group of us sat down and thought about it and debated it. And I think today, we have created something like that. And after five years, I can say that. I'll give you more numbers as we go along. But after five years, looking back, looking at all the numbers, looking at where the students are coming out, I think we've really created a low-cost, highly scalable, very high quality vigorous undergraduate degree program which I think is the need of the art of the country.

6:23Yeah. I saw some advertising a similar program at IIT Jodhpur. Is this idea spreading now? Yeah. So Goa Hati has a program like this. Jodhpur is starting a program like this. Pakhna is starting a program like this. But I think it's still early days in the sense that I think IIT Madras because of the pioneering nature of many other things we have done and online education and all that earlier, we had a bit of an advantage. I think we know a lot of secrets and a lot of things about how this works, how this model works. And I think our model is working really well today. The other institutes are learning and I think if they're interested, they may do.

7:02I'm really still waiting for some of the older, more famous IITs to act in this regard. So maybe if they do, and if and when they do, that would be a really huge next step. Yeah. Well, ultimately, given that it's online, it's not geographically fixed, it could be a combination of the top IITs. So given our nature, like I mentioned, because of our earlier experience in online education, in our program, we have teachers from all across the country. I see. Many other IITs, the faculty from other IITs teach in this program. So they contribute in so many interesting ways. So at that point, it's become a very unique and very interesting program.

7:41Yeah. Now, two things struck me in my interview so far. One was that a significant number of IT graduates are unemployed. I'm not sure why. That's what I was told last year. That is entirely true. I think, I won't say, I think, see, the way we put out that fraction of students who actually got a job and all that is a little complicated. you really understand those numbers well, but I wouldn't say a large fraction of IIT graduates are going out. Definitely not. Maybe through the regular placement on campus, there is a smaller number that's there. And I think that is a small number that still ends up looking for a job when they're available to graduate.

8:29And that is probably true, but I don't think, at least in the older IITs, the number is that large or alarming or something like that. Yeah. And then the other thing that struck me was in the ADAI mission, Mr. Singh was talking about there remains a huge gap in the number of qualified and now engineers, whatever you want to call them, and the projected need to execute the plans that they have. So I imagine, is that in your mind as well? Yeah, definitely. I think if you look at that point also a bit carefully, right? So I think the number of CS-based degree programs around computer science, the number of degree programs they have today is Skyrocket.

9:17Almost every college that I spoke about today, the engineering colleges pretty much teach only computer science. Oh, exactly. Mechanical, civil and all this sort of died down onto very small numbers. So the number of people with computer science oriented ML or AI or CS degrees is increasing. But then the difficulty in the Indian education system is we're not somehow very skill-focused from school. There is like, I think maybe it's a societal thing. I don't know if somebody has to study this more closely. But I think generally there is knowledge and other things of value and people who work with their hands get things done.

9:58It's maybe a societal tendency from long ago. We don't look at that as respectfully asked, they would look at someone who's sitting down and thinking worse. So our education system is geared towards knowledge and not so much towards skills, the hands-on skills. And that shows quite often. So you'll have a lot of people graduating with B.Tech in computer science and you'll be shocked to see that they can't get a piece of code to run in a computer. Which you would think is like the essential basic skills. They may write the code up in a piece of paper and do it. Then what good is that, right? So I think this is a recurring theme across all the entire Indian education.

10:39So maybe the people in the Indian AI mission, really what they mean is, we may have a lot of graduates, but employable graduates who can be deployed into projects and can execute on the ground. That is a big issue. So in our program, for instance, we have done something very different. In fact, I can confidently say very few degree programs in the country do that. So we do a foundation part, which happens in the beginning, about a year or so, eight months earlier. And once students finish that, we do a diploma. We call it explicitly a diploma. And it is focused completely on skills. They earn quite a few credits in that part.

11:15And it's very demanding. There are four projects that they have to execute hands on, build two apps, show that they have runs, build an ML model, show that they understand what it is and do that. Then one more ML oriented. So two ML projects, two application development projects, they have to do hands-on in demonstrator. So we put that as part of it first. Then after that, we learn the theory in the later levels, a little bit more in detail. So we've done a good combination of foundations and skills and focused a lot on skills. We want to have skill-based outcomes as essential part of this technique.

11:51So that is another innovation that we did, which is not talked about so much, but it's I think an important part. So why this program is I think likely to succeed in the future. Yeah. And when did the program start? First batch of admission was in 21 JAR. And the conceptualization and all of that was late 2019. Formal approval was 2020 in the IITM Senate. So see, you have to understand for an IIT to offer a degree, undergraduate degree without J.E., it's like, what is a good comparison? I think I had one faculty tell me, you know, Stanford will not do community college. So I think it was, it's like, I don't know how to describe it.

12:32But I think that it is a very significant move for them to do something different and that is responding to the societal need in a positive way and all of that. There is this big ivory tower that people have built into the ITC talk home. So we had to really talk to a lot of people. So that took a lot of time and convincing everybody that give us a shot at this point. We'll show you how to run a program which doesn't have a sharp filter at the input, but it will have a funnel. And the funnel will operate. I'll show you how the funnel operates. So we admit more people, keep it sad. As long as they spend enough time, pick up the spins, let them funnel through.

13:07Not everybody is going to make it. Sure. But let's have the strength of the exit. Let's have a strong filter of the exit and not the entrance. And I think today we will see that all the numbers show that. They show that this is really hard. Yeah. How long is the program? Oh, that's a tough question to answer. So nominally four years, the number of credits as a four-year program, the entire BS degree. but we have a lot of intermediate exits. I spoke about the diploma exit in the middle, right? So that's particularly important because when you want the financially less privileged folk to come in and do a program like this, they can't put away five years of their life and then study and then go to work.

13:47It doesn't work for them. It's just a period. Even if we give up 5 ,000 degrees, it doesn't work. It wasn't as serious issues at home. Somebody has to feed somebody. It doesn't work at all. So they have to start working. So that's why the skills first is very important. So at the end of the diploma, many of our students get internships. Small jobs, coding, maybe packing work, not so great, but still pace them. And then that helps them survive and go on. So there is a diploma exam. There's also a three-year degree exam. Then there's a four-year degree exam. Nominally four years, but what we're seeing on average, the foundation is about one year.

14:24Students are taking on average one year. The diploma which we thought would be two years is actually going to nearly three years, two and a half to three years. So students are struggling. Like I said, the Indian system is not focused on skills. We don't push the skills part too much and the diploma tests the skills. So it does the exact same thing. It's harder for people to do. So they take longer. Projects are incredibly strong. They really funnel up those who can sit down and do stuff for their end. So I think that's important. And then after that, once they finish the diploma, they find the degree level smooth sailing.

14:57They finish it off in a year. So the faster students, the really bright ones, are finishing it in three and a half to four years. And the more average level seems to be four and a half. Right. There's no cutoffs. No, we don't cut them off. We cut them off at eight years. So getting up in the graduate, we had more than 1 ,000 graduates at the BS level already in the first few batches. And every term, we're expecting about 500. So 300, 400, 500 types. It's increasing slowly. Yeah. And I think we will graduate about 1 ,000, 1 ,500 people in the 4-year degree every year. Yeah. And the prerequisites for coming into the program, $100.

15:40So those also we thought about carefully. Once again, our focus was we want to reach the financially less privileged. Kids who didn't go to great schools. See, that's, I think, even in the US, that's true. If you're in a city, go to a great school district and you see everything is on offer. If you go to an I mean even Atlanta that was true I know from experience go to an urban place like Atlanta and go to a normal government public school there many things are not there. You're not taught and I think you don't get AP classes you don't get any of these things. This is true in the US and it's doubly true in India.

16:13You don't get everything you want if you don't go to a great school. So we wanted to make sure that we can reach anyone. That's the move. The second thing is given the importance of data for society going forward, we cannot have only engineers do data sets. We need lawyers, we need doctors, we need humanities, we need everyone doing this. So we wanted to reach that crowd. So we decided we will do a strong foundation and assume only math and other things at what we call the 10th standard levels, like the so former year of school. And after that, students tend to specialize a little bit in school here in India.

16:48So after 10th standard, So, PILT 10th standard, it's common everywhere. And we said we will assume only that. What we need after that, small data science, we will develop as fun as our program. So, we're not relying on the fact that kids go to grade schools and all that, or they study physics, chemistry, or something in PILT standard. We don't rely on any of that. They can study whatever they want. We will build it here when they come in, and that's how they go. Yeah. So right now, at any one time, how many students are in a program? It's all right. Now I think there are more than 40 ,000 active students across various levels.

17:28But you have to understand, I think there's a funnel operator. Sure. I'm giving you the total count. It doesn't mean like 40 ,000 will graduate. Yeah, and you were saying you graduate each year. What did you say? It looks like best projections, right? Now it's about 1 ,000 to 1 ,500 a year. in the four-year B.S. But in the diploma level, we'll be much larger. We'll be in the few thousands. A few thousands will graduate in the diploma level. But in the four-year degree level, probably 1 ,000 to 1 ,000. Yeah. I took Andrew Ng's Coursera course and it relies heavily on TAs, on teachers' assistants to interact with the students.

18:05How do you scale that here? So that's an important part of our program, right? So we have faculty, right? IITs are incredibly busy. In fact, IITs end up attracting very good quality faculty. So they end up having large research groups and they contribute a lot in so many different processes. So they can't be handling large classes. Not at this level, not on the level. So what we do, which is similar to what many U.S. universities do. So a lot of U.S. universities have research tenure-track faculty and then they have teaching faculty. So we've hired people whom we call instructors. These are the full-time staff.

18:41Many of them are PhDs, masters, graduates from IITs and other institutes, very top institutes. Maybe they didn't want to go into industry. They want to be in teaching, but they can't, maybe they're not that great that they could get into tenure track research positions. So then what can they do? You know, they want to be a good teacher. So we found so many good people like that and we hired them as instructors. Instructors actually interact with students and help translate the content in a way that students can understand, sit down, solve problems with them. The foundation level for every course, there is eight hours of live sessions every week that these instructors do.

19:17So students can come in, ask questions, get their doubts clarified. The numbers are large. Maybe your voice is not heard, but you can, you know, wait. Eight hours is a long time. Sure. And when you say live, do you mean online? So the recorded lectures are done by the faculty. And then the instructors do it online live. for scaling the class because as long as you could find enough instructors to have all those things, you could scale. Yeah, so I think there's lots of interesting dynamics here. The first thing is students in an online program, we imagine they're isolated and they're sitting in front of the computer and all that.

19:59So we wanted to break that also a little. So we do a lot of student government activity, even though it's an online program that our students are put into houses. We have 12 houses named after the forests of the country. And then the houses have their own internal structure, their elected leaders and all that. And then there are clubs and societies in the students form. And these clubs and societies organize meetups in different parts. So, actually, students in the nearby areas come and meet up there. And every year, we do an on-capacity event, which is called Paradox. Paradox because it's an online program that has an on-capacity event.

20:34And the students run that program. So it's a week's program. Students have the program all across the country coming to campus. It's the summer and students are not here. So they come into campus, they do sports events, they do cultural events, they do technical events. And that's the place where they meet each other. And then they go back and they stay in touch. And there are student groups, all sorts of interesting student groups that get formed. And then they talk to each other, they help each other study. So that dynamic is something that we actively see that in some way, but we can't control every aspect of it.

21:08That's something that they have to do on their own and that's very vibrant and alive. And I would say that's a crucial, critical part. It's not like every instruction is coming from us and that doesn't work. Anyone who has done teaching will know that this belief that what I'm saying is going directly into their hearts and minds. It just doesn't work. We have to go outside of the class, talk to each other, interact, debate, and discuss. That's when things get solidified. And that's happening. And that's happening in a very interesting way, in a student-driven way. That's also a very important piece of work.

21:42Yeah, yeah. Georgia Tech has, I think, the first online master's. A little interesting aside. I applied and was rejected. I was shocked. I've never been rejected from anything. but I didn't have the necessary computer science background. But do any of the students go on to that program or other online master's programs? Not necessarily online. Many of them even go to campuses for master's programs. So last year, in fact, this year, there is an admission for the master's programs at IITs and IACs and all prop institutes. It's through an example gate. And this is a national level exam with people all across the country, right?

22:30This last year, out of the top 10 ranks, three ranks were students in school. So, and what the first ranker, the All India Rank 1, as we call him, he's actually a doctor. So he did MBBS from AIMS, which is the top medical college in the country. After two or three years, he figured out he doesn't want to be in service, doesn't want to do doctor stuff. So he wanted to go back to tech, but then he didn't have a way back. It's not easy in India to do these things. And he took this program. He did so well in it. His CG is so high, you believe. Then he wrote this GATE exam. He topped it. Now he's doing M-Tech in AI and Indian Institute of Science.

23:05So his career and life have changed. And I think something similar is, those are the sort of amazingly interesting stories. The student stories of this program are just unbelievable. There's a filmmaker in Kolkata. He's actually a filmmaker. And that's a young kid only. This filmmaker, he did our program. he finished sure he didn't get a high CG pay but he understood enough he made a lot of friends now he runs a company which does AI production and all this stuff for movies he runs a company it's sitting right here he's doing all that so I can tell you stories like this about these students and I think that's also part of it so coming back to your question yes many students are doing PC programs in India and abroad many have gone to the US UK Germany all of them and so on Yeah, with this doctor, you said the filmmaker is very young, but do you have older students coming back?

24:00Yes, yes. There's no age to meet. The oldest student we had for a while was 80 plus. Actually, I don't know, it was really hard to support him, but I don't think he finished it. But quite a few in the 60s. Yeah. And 30s and 40s also is quite a few. But of course, the large majority is under 30. But 15 % of the people in the program are actually working in companies. So that's a pretty large number as well. So that's another interesting dynamic. So these student groups I spoke about invariably has one member who's 30 years or 40 years old. Then there are others who are younger and that person is working in a company.

24:38And that group and the dynamic it has, I think has no equal anywhere else. Even if you go to a physical university, you're not going to find a peer group which has an older person and a younger person. And then there is, you say something and that person says, you know what? That's not how life works eventually. Things change after you have to go. And all these conversations are also happening. So that is also a very interesting group. Yeah. And what about international? So that number is not very large. I think about 350 or close to 400 students are outside of India. A large group among them are Indian experts.

25:17I mean, people from India who are living in various places. A small number is actually foreign citizens outside the country. I think the U.S. is maybe around 25 or 30. I'm not sure of the number. It's not very high. And how are those people discovering you? And also international. So 30 or so from the U.S., do you have Chinese students? Do you have Japanese students? Do you have Thai students? I don't know. I don't know the spread. I don't think it's that spread. International is really very small. Like I said, the large majority is in the Gulf. Gulf and Singapore is a very reasonable number. Sure, we usually have that as far.

25:55Yeah, a lot of Indian folk there. And that's why we don't reach anybody else. Ordinary without publicity efforts, we don't do serious publicity as such. Definitely not international, we are not focused on that. Yeah. And in terms of growing, are you at capacity or? Oh, that's a good question. I think we get about, every year these days, we get about 40 to 45 ,000 applications. And out of the applications, there is a small process by which people get in and then all of that. I think those applications can grow up to 100 ,000 and we'll be okay. I don't think that's going to worry us too much after that.