Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: The IITs | Hacker News Reader

Top Talent, Elite Colleges, and Migration: The IITs

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38 pointskanodiaayush43 comments

I married someone from an IIT/IIM background and I think the public should really meet them and reduce this hype. My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully). I've met many of her friends from a similar background from IIT Delhi, IIT Bombay, and IIM-A. Infact the IIT-JEET exam is not even "that" competitive, I think a lot of people get caught up in their own smoke and believe millions of indians take it every year - the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school. Overall, while I think my wife is a wonderful person, I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equilance of a UC Davis graduate - (Cal/Stanford alum myself, but going off reference points off my high school cohort).

People love branding and tribes.

All of these tests and hoops are proxies for IQ. High IQ tends to lead to better outcomes, but doesn’t guarantee them.

Where did you learn the word "Infact"? (which does not exist) Was it at Stanford?

Does typing that not result in a word highlighted with a red squiggly line for you?

You seem to have high expectations of others (i.e.: "not that smart"), but something as basic proofreading seems to be beneath you.

If you have impressive credentials but still communicate poorly and speak ill of your own family, you will fail to impress much.

Infact I learned that word in my postpostdoc at HarvPrinceYalefordbridge

Iam sorry you dontknow it

Don’t take his comment personally..

"I am so important that I do not need to proofread anything I write"

"Everyone (including my own family) is not that smart"

It is hard to not get upset with people that go through life with that mindset.

Treat others the way you want to be treated is the way things work over here.

Neither of your quoted statements are things the OP implied.

He may not value proofreading but you are poor at reading comprehension.

Echo this. While there are smart people. Entry into IITs is based on pure rote learning and discipline. Kids who memorize tomes of math and science and go through rote practice exams over and over again over their peers who are experiencing life normally usually are the ones who get in.

I have met much smarter and successful people who went into regular technical schools and are much more creative than IIT types.

IITs signal a combination of high IQ and great work ethic. People with that combination, as a general rule of thumb, do well in the professional world. But they should not be confused with Einsteins.

People with low neuroticism and high fluid intelligence do well in the professional world.

High crystallized intelligence (memorization, knowledge transfer) gets you through the door but won't make you a leader.

Can you elaborate on these skills please?

Essentially people who can adapt fast and care a lot about their work?

How do we develop these traits

The same can be said for Cal/Stanford students. (An alum from both) I’ve met some really smart people and some really mediocre people out of these schools. Same is probably true for IITs and IIMs. Testing well shouldn’t be taken as a proxy for being a genius, but at the same time, concluding that all of them are average, is a bit of a stretch.

That being said, we had students transfer over from UC Davis to Cal, and I think comparing your wife to a UC Davis graduate, is not as big of a put down as you think. Most UC Davis grads would perform almost the same as an average UC Berkeley grad if they had the same opportunity.

> My wife, while relatively smart and working at a FAANG - is not that smart (I'm trying to use my words respectfully).

Hopefully she doesn't read Hacker News!

Hopefully she does.

The fun thing is that it doesn’t even matter how smart you are to begin with beyond a surprisingly low threshold.

> it doesn’t even matter how smart you are

If you care about being "happy"? Sure.

But plenty of things require a bit more than "a surprisingly low threshold". You're not going to be Jeff Dean (for example) if you're just "smart".

Why do you need to be Jeff Dean? Might as well say you’re not going to be Tom Brady by being smart.

Perhaps I shouldn't have mentioned a specific name. The point is, some things are impossible to do unless you are extremely smart.

So, in response to your first comment, "it doesn't even matter how smart you are" is not accurate unless you specify the context you're referring to.

Sure and certain things are impossible to do unless you’re extremely strong. So what? Pure intelligence, like strength, is generally not the limiting factor

Yep, in many situations intelligence beyond a certain threshold isn't the limiting factor. That's the qualifier missing from the first comment that I addressed. In some situations (that HN members may be disproportionately interested in), it is and it matters.

imo most people give up before their intelligence would become the true limiting factor

the problem is most standardized tests aren't good at really finding the extremes of the spectrum. There are some proposed solutions to this, whatever government actually implements them will reap the rewards of finding and recruiting the best talent available and nurturing them to reach their potential.

basically what you are talking about is the difference between someone who is very smart, one in a thousand, that can score well with lots of studying compared to a one in a million type genius capable of winning math Olympiads. Most standardized tests lump these people in the same category

> one in a thousand

That's probably way too high of a threshold. Many standardized tests lump everyone who is in the top 5-10% of ability, as long as they prepare sufficiently well.

As someone from an IIT, an average student in IIT would possibly pass for an average student in aUS state college (UT Austin, UCSD etc), but the geniuses in the Indian student population are over represented in IIT’s. The top student in my batch, decided to do independent research from his home, published a blog post that Ian Goodfellow praised in a tweet and now switched fields and is pursuing a PhD in mathematics from Stanford.

> the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand), than some of our exams here - like for law school and medical school

Do you have some source backing this up? A cursory search reveals that more than 850,000 applicants attempted the IIT-JEE exam in 2023. Total available college vacancies slightly more than 16,000. This number would be around 5000 for the OG IITs.

For US medical colleges, for 2022-2023 admission cycle, 22,712 of the 55,188 students who applied to medical school matriculated. Perhaps these numbers belongs to a specific US region?

I would say that attempting JEE is now more or less a cultural thing. 90% of the applicants (pardon the number out of thin air) sit the exam because that's just something you do after finishing school.

> the fact is that less people take the IIT-JEET (a couple of hundred thousand)

This is factually incorrect, or maybe you are referring to JEE-Advanced. The top of the funnel (i.e., JEE Mains), is over 1MM out of which about 25% qualify for JEE-Advanced.

> I would peg her and many of her classmates at the equivalence of a UC Davis graduate

Wouldn't you say the same about most MIT and Stanford grads as well? A lot of eminent people in Tech industry graduated from MIT and Stanford. But, in my experience, the reverse isn't true: graduating from those schools is usually not an indicator of eminence.

Generalizing wildly from anecdata, I'd say the only thing correlated with graduating from those schools is arrogance.

Whether IIT are "that smart" or not like 1differential's comment talks about is irrelevant.

IIT have prestige. If they care about leveraging that prestige and incentivize their graduates to some lifestyle choices there's ways to do it.

One example is the elite French "école polytechnique" (think the #1 IIT equivalent in engineering): tuition is waived, you even get paid a stipend as a student... But if you don't serve in French public service for 10 years after graduation, you have to repay it.

https://programmes.polytechnique.edu/en/ingenieur-polytechni...

> There are no study costs for French students, on the condition that they work for the civil service for at least 10 years within the 20 years following their graduation. Otherwise, they must repay the tuition fees

That would work as a "brain drain" tax.

Without addressing the actual money involved this will be not complete:

> EU students: €19,000 for 3 years

> Year 1: €3,500

> Year 2: €7,750

> Year 3: €7,750

Repaying such amount is not a very big deal

You took the wrong column (the amount to be repaid is €31,000) but your point remains valid.

(Moreover, it is often paid by the employer who wants to recruit a student just after graduation.)

The source I posted has the exact amounts

> As of today, the total amount to be repaid is set at

> €21,000 for students who have chosen to join a government body for Year 4

> €31,000 for students who have not chosen to join a government body for Year 4

Such amount is not as insignificant in a country with high taxes and where peers in university have like $100/year tuition, it's not super high either (maybe 4-6 months of after tax salary for an entry level position)

But I didn't bother posting is as i think it's not relevant. IIT could set that amount at 1 rupee, or 1 lakh, or 1 crore. There's a threshold where this switches from "that's fair you're repaying tuition" to "oh now you're adding a steep penalty"

It's complex to set the right value: too high and you're forcing your graduates to choose a high paying job or a government job, but you're killing their chances of startup creation. Too low and IIT is leaving money on the table.

I wonder whether the allure of migrating out of the country has lessened somewhat among more recent graduates.

Speaking anecdotally, of my group of six friends (we graduated from an IIT about ten years ago), one never expressed any interest in traveling (he subsequently went to an IIM and worked for a FAANG in India), two spent several years in the US but went back, and a fourth has expressed interest in returning to India. All of us who came to the US worked for FAANGs or got Masters / MBAs / PhDs from very well-ranked American universities.

More personally, living in the US has not come across as unambiguously better than living in India. I'm in academia, and I cannot imagine an institute like IISc being substantially more difficult to navigate than where I currently am. Society is more broad-minded, politics is (comparatively) less of a shithole, and a few metrics such as pollution and bureaucratic corruption are somewhat better. On the other hand, I am half the world away from aging family, it is easier to be lonely, I miss the food, and with a FAANG salary, I could live like royalty in India.

Life in India is not for me, but I suspect that the range of opinions is getting more varied than (say) thirty years ago.

I would 100% want to move out of India and I think a lot of Indians do.

I've worked tech in Mumbai and Fairfax County (I was one of the fleet of Americans that descended on Mumbai about 10 years ago). I think the big difference is more about corporate/institutional culture than anything else. You have a roughly equivalent lifestyle in a lot of ways (small apartment you're paying way too much for, insane traffic, money for all the "stuff" you want but not really enough to build wealth), modulo some specific differences like hiring a full-time housekeeper or not. But there's a huge difference in the larger corporate cultures where a lot of Indian firms try to emulate the Infosys "we have a problem for every solution" way of doing things; there's less willingness to go out on a limb and break things.

OTOH there is now a tiffin delivery service in Reston, and a Krispy Kreme in Mumbai, so something tells me there's a convergence happening.

I have one cousin (not an IIT grad) who worked for about a decade in Manhattan and then happily moved back to Mumbai. His brother also moved to the USA and has no desire to return to India.

Ironically the harder you make it for people to enter, the more likely they are to stick around rather than move back and forth.

The range of opinions definitely varies more than before but in my experience not by that much out of choice.

IMO the primary reason (and the only one among my circles) that Indians move back to India is immigration issues. Both for them individually and for family. The lack of being able to ever get citizenship prevents people from bringing family which then adds the additional layer of reasons to move back.

What I will say I see less of is Indians giving up and moving to "backup" countries. They're giving up and going back to India more often. (Not saying people should treat countries that way but a lot of people do).

Obviously all anecdotes but just my 2c.

Seen this as well in Berlin, as I've come to talk to quite a bit of Indians living here. Life here is better in many ways regarding safety, pollution, personal (cultural) freedom, etc., but in terms of (software) money India can sometimes beat Berlin even without regard for cost of living. Once cost of living is included in the comparison the difference becomes quite stark, especially with regards to services like food and cleaning. So the Indians here face a tradeoff that's more about personal taste than a clear win in any direction.

There was a CNN article about India’s time-bomb of unemployment. Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants. The net effect is a further intensification of competition : be it for college or school admissions or jobs. The average number of applicants for an open job slot has increased two-fold or something more.. this changing environment has a bearing on what IIT graduates plan for their next step

> Job creation is not able to keep up with number of applicants

That's a symptom of not having a free market.

Though some are top-pf-the-world class like IITs, most of the schools (at all levels) are pretty bad, so only low skill jobs are possible for the vast majority of the population.

That was true in China 30+ years ago, when it had its demographic boom. It now has to deal with an aging population and a different global economy.

Today India is demographically a lot like China was back then, and there is some geopolitical desire to diversify the supply chain away from China-only. Thus many are counting on India to be able to tread the same path China did. We shall see.

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