The price students pay for a prized IIT seat
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I don't mean to say that IIT graduates lack creativity - there are many well-known examples to the contrary. My point is that an academic system where success is predicated on test-taking ability will produce great test-takers who function quite well as cogs in the machine. The system does not cultivate enough creative thinkers who can imagine the machines that have not yet been built.
Being able to question the judgement of an authority figure / decision maker is a privilege. A squeaky wheel gets the grease but a raised nail gets the hammer. Engineers generally lean more nail than wheel in most orgs, and being a minority or otherwise less respected subset of that group makes you feel even more like a nail.
Dotting I's and crossing T's is exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from a person who is smart enough to recognize something is a stupid idea, knows that they lack the authority to make any changes, and will bear the bunt of the inevitable failure.
Maybe? But it makes them useless for my purposes. Which requires them to think for themselves.
Now if someone could only help me locate that speech.
What I think you mean to is you want a person who will take action. And that's down to company culture. If you want employees who act empowered, you have to give them power.
You're right about this. Indian work culture tends toward rigid hierarchical structures, and expects employees to be much more deferent to authority than you would find in a typical Silicon Valley startup. However, even after bringing our startup culture out there (unlimited PTO, stock options, choose your own hours, don't call me "sir"), I still find this test-taking mentality to be what dominates an engineer's decision making.
Because of this, I know to be extremely specific on exact deliverables and tickets. The "rockstar developer" who can think deeply about the end user's needs is an extremely rare thing to find out there. The dominant mentality among developers is to expect a detailed specification that can be treated as the exact boundary of the problem.
To give a concrete example - I recently got quite frustrated when a simple CRUD feature shipped without a delete button, since the specification failed to explicitly mention where the button should go. Out of 30 developers and a full QA team, not one person thought critically about the specification or tried using the app from a user's perspective.
I come from a manufacturing background and have moved into software. In manufacturing, if there actually are issues with the specification, you raise those through engineering change notices. If you start changing the spec on your own, that’s a big time no.
Do you have a formal process for spec changes or are you expecting the team to raise these issues independently and unprompted?
If someone has actually raised concerns with you about the spec or offered up changes, how did you respond to those? I work with people who always say, “why doesn’t anyone challenge me on my ideas?” This happens at the end of a meeting where these people will have shot down everyone else and their ideas. In reality they want “yes people” who tell them there is no disagreement because their idea is best.
I’m not saying this is you, but they may have been through these experiences and might need permission or direct instruction to show them speaking up is valued.
Which is of course nonsense. The same test-based education system also produced leaders such as the CEO of Google, CEO of IBM and the CEO of Albertsons. If you have been able to hire some to close "JIRA tickets" you scraped the bottom of the barrel and maybe you shouldn't be making generalized conclusions based on your observations!
[1] https://www.atlassian.com/software/jira/service-management/t...
When you complete a course there's an exam, and labs and assignments typically have a set of instructions to get started and a list of requirements.
And there is always a domain expert (TA) not far. Now they are learning to become the domain expert in their own (limited) area.
No student enters IIT declaring a CS major like an American university - they have to first excel at test-taking within IIT across a range of subjects (chemistry, physics, etc), so they can be part of the top cohort within IIT that is allowed to enroll in CS classes. Based on a couple Youtube video lectures I watched, these courses tend to be lecture-based and tested based on printing the correct output (not on software architecture or code quality).
Some of our younger IIT developers say the system is modernizing to be more like other higher education programs, so I might be totally wrong here.
Me and my batch of high school buddies managed to get into IITs (and NITs which are a step down from IITs) while putting in some work, but not killing ourselves. All of us were athletes, so a 2-3 hours of sports daily for us was a must. All of us did some amount of coaching, and though the coaching classes gave us enough exercises to last us the entire month, daily, we had enough sense to figure out how much practice was enough practice. (Surprisingly, it's not a lot) Most of us did have other hobbies, some of us ended up pursuing them full time.
Yes we always had the kind of students the article mentions, spending each moment they're not asleep on DPPs (daily practice problems). Guess what, some of them made it into IITs (which they would have even if they put in less effort), but a lot of them actually never made it despite putting in that effort.
Not all of us are the soulless robots described here.
My dad got into an IIT and it was basically like you describe it. I got into IIT and it was like how this article describes it. It’s also gotten easier since I took the JEEs because they’ve quadrupled the number of seats available by enlarging the existing IITs and making a bunch of new colleges IITs, so I suspect it’s easier now than when I was taking those exams.
The Government of India spends a lot of its resources badly for populist reasons, and scarcity can be mitigated with what they have currently on hand.
Though, gate keeping is a widespread human cultural tendency, India still hasn’t had any champions emerge, who have successfully fought against it, like for example Theodore Vail did in the US.
> “They have been cut off from society, they are unaware of current affairs, and are desperately in need of our induction programme for freshers where we try to re-orient them to society and the institute,” the (IIT) professor said on the condition of anonymity. This skill gap haunts them even when they graduate. Despite all the hard work engineering students put in, a survey conducted in 2019 found that 80 per cent of engineers “are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5 per cent of them possess technical skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that industry requires”
The survey was looking at all engineers, not IIT graduates. If someone did a survey of IIT graduates specifically, I doubt even 1% would qualify as "unfit for any job". There is nothing in the survey which lends support to the idea that all their time spent studying "haunts them even when they graduate".
Not to mention the insinuation that "only 2.5 per cent of them possess technical skills in Artificial Intelligence" is a bad outcome for IIT graduates. The vast majority of engineers choose not to specialize in AI... because there are tons of alternative areas to focus on. This is also completely unrelated to the IIT prep culture.
I hate to generalize, but journalists in every country seem to have a real axe to grind against engineers. Presumably because we're their polar opposites in every way. And we also make a lot more money than they do... which must really get under their skin.
Completely unrelated to IITs.
We went to school then tuitions in the evening and whole days of coaching on the weekend. That didnt leave much time to play around, acquire new skills and hobbies and when we tried our parents and teachers were not exactly supportive of it because we could spend that additional time on cramming more.
Just using a stupid test as a benchmark to get into a country's most prestigious colleges without taking into account if the student even has a passion for the subject is an absolutely broken system.
That is exactly what I said. The experience described in the article is just one side of the story, which I never denied exists, but that isn't the only side of the story. Also let me rephrase what you said, "Just because it didn't work out for you, doesn't mean it didn't for everyone else". Therefore, a need for a balanced point of view.
But if you tie a person’s social status to performance on a single test, you suffocate all the useful things people could be doing if they didn’t have to solely dedicate themselves to prep. So maybe we’re doing okay as-is.
This is why Stanford and Harvard are far more popular and recognizable compared to Caltech and MIT even though the quality of the students is virtually identical.
if you work in admissions as a place like Harvard or Stanford they will tell you point blank they make those kinds of "sentiment" considerations. I'm personally not a fan, but I get it.
Citation Needed.
I also think it's even arguable that MIT has more prestige than Harvard - of course this will depend how you're defining prestige, but people definitely assume high intelligence when they hear a student goes to MIT in a way they don't for Harvard. Which I have to imagine is at least somewhat explainable by the admissions differences.
Caltech is a much smaller school and is maybe a better example of a school that's underrated by people who don't know better? But for any reasons that prestige would actually matter I doubt Caltech students have any problems either.
Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial, the LSE, Sciences Pos, X, ÉNA are all counter examples. You can select purely on academics just fine.
Obviously the people involved in the process were generally ethically minded but if this thread shows anything, it’s that two people may do quite different things while each trying to act ethically.
Having lived in the US for a decade now, one of the biggest culture gap I keep and that probably won't ever go away is how it's somewhat accepted here that "letting rich kids cheat/buy their way into Ivy League is not that bad, and look it pays for a new cafeteria".
What I'm going for is more the idea that if you consider the best alternative I can think of to the "holistic" approach, you get selecting applicants purely based on entrance exam scores. In such a world you'd be punishing a kid who plays with Arduino out of interest. Any energy devoted towards something other than test prep is energy wasted.
In the American system, as I'm coming to see it, the kid who plays with Arduino is punished less. The test won't take you all the way anyways, and you even get a little "refund" on attention sunk into some types of activity which qualify as extracurricular.
For course selection too. You'll have students picking out classes because they are known to be easy and not because they are curious about it. Because they have to keep their GPA at a certain level.
Learning how the world works, apparently :(
What a truly stunning coincidence indeed.
There's a percentage of admitted students at which it's interesting to admit based on donations. Especially if one large donation can make need-blind admission possible for N students. But do it too much and you'll become a school that's known as "pay to win".
> (our "preparatory classes" system also has similar high competitiveness/high pressure characteristics, to prepare for a few deciding exams
There's also a third hidden option. The Polytechnique in Montreal is notorious for this: admit too much, collect tuition and then have students transfer out when they can't handle the workload.
Job interviews would benefit from the same thing, to go by the self-reported amount of time wasted on leetcode around here.
Rewarding people for simply being born with high IQ is the opposite of meritocratic.
Read Young's original book coining the term: it was both a satire and dystopian lament. Far from a term of approval!
Certainly many people -- perhaps most -- believe that "IQ" (loosely defined) is in fact the proper definition of meritocracy.
(In case it's not obviously I definitely disagree)
It's all well and good if you're smart because it increases your advantage two-fold. But it basically screws over everyone else.
To steal another idea from the job interview discussions: what you want might be entry-level intro survey type classes that are broadly open to lots of people (maybe online) but have a high bar for completion to gain full admission, and focus on some of the hands-on aspects of the field in question. "Lower bar + weed out courses" is used in a lot of places that couldn't get away with the high bar of MIT or such.
Alternately, I often suspect the best solution would be fully randomized admissions. Does it make sense to stratify by institution, so that you have one single gate into university, instead of looking at the output of four years of work across mostly-evenly-distributed places? Where you can more legitimately assume that what someone gets out of their time will be the result of what they personally put into it?
I also have some doubts about meritocracy for a couple of reasons:
1) Although we can try very hard to be objective, at the end of the day everything is subjective
2) So called "merit" seems to be largely based on genetic traits (Intelligence, personality, physical, etc)
I'm a failure by meritocracy by nature of losing at all of the tests we use to judge success and merit - test scores, elite school admission, elite institutions etc.
I'm genuinely asking because I have no clue what people want "merit" to mean. I always assumed the entire point was to remove environmental factors (to varying degrees).
I don't know what merit should really mean though. It seems like there will always be some sort of hierarchy in society, so I guess defining what constitutes merit is a pick-your-poison kind of situation.
To be perfectly clear, I don't dispute ability exists - I just don't think that should be the ideal organizing philosophy for society.
And this might be getting a little personal, but just read that person's username. Acharya is a common Brahmin title, so I'm not very surprised that he thinks this way.
Basically, whatever thing you choose as the metric, people with more resources and information will be able to optimize for it better. However, the more difficult the metric becomes to achieve, the more it benefits those who already benefit from the resource and information asymmetry.
I almost can't think of something more middle-class than an aggressive dedication to as many extra-curricular activities as possible. SUVs full of children being driven from baseball to ballet to swimming? Seems a common part of culture for the middle-class?
And those SUVs require parents (usually moms) with the free time to do all that driving and managing.
Every admission system prides itself in being the best but they all ultimately end up getting gamified. Because there is too much at stake.
Actually, most of adult working life is already like that: there's many potential job interviews, projects that you can compete to various level of success, etc. The "single test" typically only exists in systems of higher education.
My hobbies were largely desk-bound/sedentary --- coding, trivia --- that I was able to carry out at a reduced pace, and resume after I cleared the exams. The pressure during the ages 15-17 was definitely quite intense --- I'd typically come home at 3 in the afternoon, and work until midnight with a few short breaks in between. However, I think I did create a narrative of what I was going through that led to me actually enjoying the reading and problem-solving (in spite of feeling stressed out). At that age, it can feel like a superpower to be given a list of chemicals and predict what structures would emerge in a chemical reaction, or be able to compute the motions of particles in an EM field. With over 10+ years of hindsight now, I feel the following ---
-- The notion of an "ideal" childhood being lost depends on how you define the ideal. (edit : There was no pressure to have a girlfriend or boyfriend at that age. No "jocks" bullying studious "nerds". The "nerds" were the "cool" kids all through in fact. ) Of course, I don't imagine that people killing themselves or burning out would count as normal in any culture.
-- I'd say the ability to slog things out for many hours of the day across weeks many is something that has stayed with me. At the same time, there are numerous great scientists and engineers who have developed this ability without having to go through this process (edit: at ages 15-17).
-- As one person in the article points out, yes, I definitely was very late to pick up many life skills that are likely second-nature to teenagers in the West.
-- While I could solve problems and apply concepts easily, it was from a shallow understanding of topics. I definitely did not develop a meta-understanding of why, say, Newton's laws are structured that way, or what consequences it has for the structure of physical laws relying on Newton's laws. These skills I had to learn much later on.
Immediately thought of that relevant Silicon Valley scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKz0M6SmQ8c
You could write a similar story about pro athletes probably, although team sports would include some level of socialization by default, not all sports are team sports. And I imagine a lot of other sacrifices (friendships outside the team or sport, hobbies, education) are made in pursuit of a pro athlete dream too. And of course there are tons of people who put that kind of work and sacrifice into becoming a pro athlete and never make it.
I think the part that really makes this story stand out to me is the fact that even the ones who make it into this prestigious program don't actually wind up in some top echelon. The article says they find the skill gap between what the industry wants and what they have studied is too big.
That is incredible. Absolutely bonkers to sacrifice so much at a shot at some "top" thing that basically never actually pays off for anyone.
It seems to me that the kids pursuing it think it will take them to the top. I don't think anyone works that hard and sacrifices everything for a shot at being mediocre.
Taking tests and learning academic material? They appear to be super successful. Being able to navigate the world of business and working with other people? Well, they aren't learning all the soft skills and life experience they need.
I see this partially as a failure of the metrics used for acceptance. Social skills and other activities are important to the success of an individual, and they should be measured as such when considering who to accept.
Try telling an Indian parent to drop their kid out of school in grade 9 to join a cricket camp full time. But doing it for IIT is totally acceptable.
It heavily implies that. The story says "Despite all the hard work engineering students put in, a survey conducted in 2019 found that 80 per cent of engineers “are not fit for any job in the knowledge economy and only 2.5 per cent of them possess technical skills in Artificial Intelligence (AI) that industry requires”."
But if you follow the link it goes here: https://www.businesstoday.in/current/corporate/indian-engine...
That story is about engineers in general, not IIT graduates specifically. It seems disingenuous to highlight the exceptional efforts required to become an IIT graduate yet downplay graduates' post-graduation prospects by referring to engineers in general.
That's my question too. When it comes to studying, "toil" is a four-letter word for American people. Oh, you study too hard. Oh you have a lost childhood. Oh solving math problems is not FaIr to other kids, for it shadows the true talent.
But when it comes to sports? Oh man, the tone totally changes. "Toil" is da word! Mileage matters! If you train hard, you get better results! Have you seen LA of 4am in the morning? Do you know the kid next door trains 5 hours every day, and breaks his bones at least 3 times and still does not give up? Mommy wants you to know the story of whoever practicing free throws a thousand times a day. Daddy will use all the retirement savings to hire a coach of this bullshit sport that you would never make it to the top of, but hey don't be like that Asian family who spend all their money hiring science tutors even though their kids will have a decent chance of becoming a good engineer.
What a nation of hypocrisy
Give students a score-bonus for:
- Completing a triathlon
- Doing 60 push-ups in a minute
- Performing 500 hours of community service
Even if it doesn't change how competitive the system is, at least you'll end up with an army of nerdy buff do-gooders. Hardly the worst outcome for any society.
Making good health, community service and social skills a core requirement to get admission seems like a great idea. Can this also be gamed? Sure. It’s not like the existing criteria are not being gamed by families with a lot more money.
It is futile to complain about how the admission system cuts kids off from society and takes a toll on their health. Fierce competition for scarce resources is inevitable. Sure, the government can do a much better job of spending whatever resources are at hand, but even efficiency can only go so far.
This kind of out of the box thinking is more likely to yield results than pining for ideal situation that simply doesn’t exist.
About 0.9% of IIT applicants will be admitted. Compare to Ivy League Universities, which range from 4.5% (Harvard) to 10.6% (Cornell).
That said, I spoke with one IIT graduate who tried to downplay the experience. I could never tell if he was being humble or polite, or if he really felt the difficult was exaggerated. He was smart, but he didn't seem to have missed out on a childhood for the sake of getting into IIT. Of course, I grew up with several smart peers who made getting into Ivy League universities look like a walk in the park.
[0]https://qz.com/1584304/acceptances-rates-at-top-us-colleges-...
For example Oxford and Cambridge have seemingly very high acceptance rates... but this is because in the UK students can only apply to one top-tier university. The Ivy League has tiny acceptance rates because many students apply to many of them. I guess you could apply to literally all of them if you wanted to? Does that make them harder to get into?
However there is the flip side that it's rare to apply to one of these schools as a random "why the hell not" reach. Probably 90% of the applicant pool has a good enough background to feel they are a serious competitor, which would be the top fraction of college bound seniors overall. I would guess the IIT exam is a less self selected pool.
In my experience there's definitely a point in which better scores on things such as the JEE stop being correlated with both college performance, life satisfaction or even career earnings.
Bring the citations because the research shows that doing better on highly g loaded tests is basically an unalloyed good.
Put in other words, make a list of all students who you would be happy to have on campus and draw randomly if you have more students than freshman dorm space. If there is a large oversupply of students who passed the threshold to enter the lottery, then it may be time to consider increasing the requirements. If you don’t need to lottery at all, then there are probably difficult institutional questions to ask.
I will admit that this shouldn’t be the only system for admission at any school, as it leaves no room for the various specialty admission channels. My gut feeling says that at least ⅔ of the student body should enter through the general admission lottery with the remaining third reserved for athletics, academic scholarship winners, full-price foreign scholars, affirmative action, townies, etc…
And how is different from a Korean students doing everything they can so they can get into the top medical school?
And how is it different from a Japanese kid fighting to get into Tokyo University?
And how is it different from a Chinese student who walks 10 miles every day to attend high school so she can get into a top-tier university?
Do Americans even know that some countries do not have as many universities as the US? Do they know that national entrance exams can be the most fair system a country could afford? Do they even know that building leadership in high school can be a luxury that millions of family wouldn't even dream to have, yet the families can still produce brilliant students?
Holistic my ass.
Seriously, though, we should look at statistics instead of individual samples to assess the value of education. I mean, how many students can really solve a JEE question like below by rote memory? I'm sure there are some who got lucky, but I'd rather believe most of the students who could solve such problem truly learned some math:
If f(x) is a differentiable function and g(x) is a double differentiable function such that |f(x)| <= 1 and f'(x) = g(x). If f^2(0) + g^2(x) = 9. Prove that there exists some c \in (-3, 3) such that g(c)g"(c) < 0.
Increasingly, never
Had a students father drop off their mask for them before class last week because they forgot it
This is one of the long lasting impacts I’m seeing covid have on society already
It just sounds so alien that people would live like that - but at the same time, it's completely understandable. The payoff can be life-altering, so it's really no different than would-be athletes here, that devote their lives for the sport, because first prize could be pro-sports contract with multi-million salaries, while second prize is basically a set of stake knives, in the long run.
When I grew up, I spent maybe an hour on homework? If that. Granted, we had very, very little rote learning, and the school system put a lot of emphasis on conceptual understanding. We simply did not participate in problem-grinding.
Same for college and university. Undergrad was quite hectic, but the workload was much higher than anything I had experienced before. Still, I don't know a single student from my class that studied from morning to night.
If anything, I hope they got the payoff they were hoping for.
I know a couple of them personally, and a fair number of other IIT graduates besides, and while many of them did work hard, all of them did/do have hobbies and all that, not quite fitting the "No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood" headline or the rest of the picture painted here.
I prefer the system in Switzerland, because everyone gets a shot at studying in the university but only those who can pass the exams can continue studying. Of course it means that the entire university experience is high pressure but it's more meritocratic, since different high schools have different standards for a good grade.
A lot easier to get into MIT or Caltech, but of course there is no way they could process 1.5M applicants.
> No life, no hobbies, burnout, lost childhood — the price students pay for a prized IIT seat
Even in the US there is something wrong when you have to skip courses in (for example) fine arts (e.g. visual arts, music, drama) because they aren't considered serious "college preparatory" subjects and usually won't help your admission chances unless you are a superstar.
That’s not to say I don’t like them. I read tons, but I wasn’t chained to it.
Maybe the situation is different over here, but I guess it’s because I never felt that I needed to score top 1% to even be considered for positions?
The Netherlands has a fairly hierarchical hiring system, so if you score into one of the 3 levels you’ll generally be considered for a job at that level. Jobs at level 3 aren’t making shitloads more money that level 1 either (maybe some 2x more).
Wow, this is insane. For all the kids in the world who are doing this sort of thing, JEE or Gaokao style 1-in-100 pass rate, keep some things in mind:
- When you're older, you will appreciate your school friends more than any others. They're the only people whose parents have fed you. You know their life stories. You're each other's support network. Today, my friend from school lost his dad. I drove right over. We phoned another classmate who had the same thing happen to him the week before. I don't know what people do if they don't have these kinds of relationships.
- Very few people will pass, but everyone can learn the material. You can learn the material (Machine Learning, civil engineering, linear algebra, etc) to a high standard, and still forgetting one little thing will make you not be top 1%. We can't all be top, but CAN all understand the knowledge that people before us have discovered.
- When you leave university, there are no more exams. If you optimize your whole life towards passing exams, you will suddenly come to a point where somehow you will be judged on things other than finite, concisely answerable questions. Both open ended questions like "how should we design this system" and more vague ones like "how do we all work together".
- To even have a chance of passing a 1% bar, you need a fair bit of privilege. You're likely to have come from a better off, stable family. You also need some luck at that level. The simple fact of the examiner deciding to include a topic that is fresh in your mind could be the difference between passing and failing.
- You're not actually learning things when you study for an exam of this high a bar. You're memorizing tables, because if you don't happen to have that trigonometric identity in your head, you won't pick up that marginal point. Or you memorize constants that in any real life situation would be a lookup in a book. Or you memorize proofs so that you don't have to spend valuable exam time actually thinking.
- Even after you pass through the eye of the needle, you will not feel that special. I went to a top, world-famous uni, and people were mostly ordinary. I'd say half of my higher level math and physics classmates from high school would have done just fine. I didn't think there were many especially smart people there, maybe a few reasonably hard workers. But none of the John Nash in A Beautiful Mind kind of striking genius.
- It's turtles all the way down. What's natural after you pass this exam is that certain businesses will present their hiring pipeline as the next step. Don't buy their crap. There's just more and more filters, and the ones in the corporate ladder are brutal. There's no official exam result, and very few places in the next round of musical chairs. Someone is bound to pass every single hurdle, but it won't be you.
- This style of exam belongs in math contests. I used to enjoy those in high school, and framing it as an extracuricular allows the people who don't want to compete to opt out. It's totally fair to have a high bar in a math contest, and it's totally fair to ask unintuitive questions like that IMO question with the windmill. In the end it's a bit of extra exercise for the brain with low cost of failure. You don't have to feel bad if you get a math contest question wrong.
Finally, I think the real problem is that India is a huge country that really ought to have more spaces. If you're at a point where over 100 kids are competing for one space, you can add some spaces and get more engineers out, without compromising quality. Making extra lessons for people to pass doesn't increase the number of spaces, the majority of the effort of crawling over your cohort is wasted.
But I agree with everything else!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credentialism_and_educational_...
Hard to tell how you would easily stop the trend of educational inflation though, degrees are an easy way to sort through applicants.
Population growth is entirely due to immigration.
We should open our borders to other very-high-HDI countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Human_Dev...
(With diversity and equality requirements, eg. max 10% from any one country, max 49% males from any one country)
And disallow immigration from all others.
Perfect for the "elite" who get to coast on trust funds while the unemployed poors die off.
Not so perfect when an outside force decides to declare war.
More affordable housing is a major factor in fertility rates, so eventually the population just finds a stable equilibrium.
Increasing population leads to the opposite - the elites are the ones pushing for mass-immigration, since they benefit from rising land prices and lower wages.
How do you suppose we incentive competition in stagnation?
https://a127-jobs.nyc.gov/psc/nycjobs/EMPLOYEE/HRMS/c/HRS_HR...
It doesn't invalidate your broader point in the slightest, of course.
Did you really mean engineer or did you mean entry level technician?
When I graduated high school in the late 80's, you would at least need a community college degree to become even a technician or technologist.
By the time they achieve their aim, if they do, many realise they have lost out on social skills, ability to communicate easily with others (an attribute now known as soft skills), and of course, some part of their youth.
This is what happens when a reporter at a online publication of a quality between Buzzfeed and Slate writes a clickbait article on why an apex institution is destroying youth. Admission to the IITs is widely considered in India to writing a golden ticket in life. They can study abroad at virtually any university, get hired by multinationals in India or abroad etc. etc.
The points the reporter makes might be factually correct but are misguided and erroneous. This is not like students who don't study for the IITs get a more holistic education. Ask what exactly would the kids do if not study for the IITs? Workout, train physically, work with their hands on vocational skills? All these are either absent in Indian society or looked down upon.
The whole Indian system by virtue of demand >> supply due to 70 years of socialism/quais-communism is about state monopoly on education. Indian spend 10s of billions of dollars sending their children abroad for undergraduate and masters education because supply is so meagre. If your family is not wealthy then this is the only guaranteed way out, rather used to be, as things are slowly changing.
Hate to say this but there is also an element of sour grapes to the writer's lament - IIT graduates command social prestige, job opportunities and mating opportunities.
Now go write about how kids in the US work so hard to pass BUDS spend all their lives perfecting their physical endurance in detriment to their mind. Or the football players who devote all their energies to get noticed by college scouts. IIT's are no different just in a different realm. I would almost argue that the IIT exams are superior as they are atleast not damaging their body and wasting prime years of their lives not developing their minds.