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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

One question: does India have equivalents to U.S. private colleges and universities? It seems like one of the U.S.'s major strengths comes from the fact that you don't _have_ to choose public schools, which means that a) you have many more schools to choose from and b) the competition, especially for top students, forces public schools to be somewhat better.

A more minor Q, if you feel like answering it: which school are you at in the U.S.?

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I don't know much about the US. In India, some universities have have campuses and some don't. There are colleges affiliated to them. Then, there are govt-run colleges and private colleges. In between those two, there are aided colleges, which are run by a private trust, but funded by the govt (the trust gets to make profit while the govt pays a specific grant every year which takes care of the institute's expenditure and faculty salaries).

There are also deemed universities. These are just privately run colleges that have been given authority to have their own curriculum, provided, they fulfill the infrastructure requirements and other stuff.

Faculty, except in a few reputed institutes, are horrible. Horrible as in worst massacre of the terms involved in the subject. We had a lecturer for web programming classes who said "AJAX is a programming language". Fine! Teaching in India isn't taken up based upon interest or merit. It's the job people see as a fallback. They end up there when they don't get into their beloved Infosys, Wipro, TCS and other body shopping companies (due to their low grades coz these companies hire by grades). Some of these faculty turn out to be ego machines who don't learn and never like to see their students knowing more. And the cycle goes on...

The some colleges have pathetic infrastructure and are still given approval for affiliation (cash under the table baby!).

BONUS - A funny incident: We were asked to submit an abstract for (compulsory) 30 minutes talks. The format given to us by our in-charge lecturer was a cover page with title and student name, a separate abstract page and put these in a stick file. It seems one paper with title, student name and abstract won't do.

> The format given to us by our in-charge lecturer was a cover page with title and student name, a separate abstract page and put these in a stick file.

@SingAlong Your lecturer was just helping prepare you for the real world. So you wouldn't forget to put cover sheets on your TPS reports!

>We had a lecturer for web programming classes who said "AJAX is a programming language"

I had a lecturer who said API was a programming language. It's only while studying for exams (during the study hols) I came to know what an API was. :|

India does have many private colleges and universities, but their quality varies a lot. CS courses in most of them are dictated by the needs of the outsourcing biggies like Infosys and TCS, which doesn't gel with traditional CS hacking. However, with the rise in the startup culture, these private universities are changing for good.

PS: I am a student at one of these private universities.

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