There is a crisis in the undergraduate (UG) programs of IITs. There are two related symptoms arising out of it: UG students in the nation’s most prestigious engineering institutions are not becoming engineers; they are also not in the best mental health.

While this is a complex problem, one way forward would be to give students the freedom to choose their branch of study after they are admitted to university.

This would replace brutal external compulsion with internal motivation, ensuring that students really love what they learn because they chose it after exploring various options. This could be better than the suffering they are put through for four years in a branch they didn’t even know enough about to choose at age 18.

Lulled into a false sense of success by the dazzling pay cheques of a handful of graduates who probably would have made it anyway, distracted by the daily grind of teaching and research, and perhaps immobilised by a sense that the task is beyond their institutional powers, the IITs have failed to address the crisis in their BTech programme. But there are several impediments to enhancing student freedom coming from students and parents as well.

The students and their parents are sanguine about the non-engineering outcomes of the IITs because “engineering” has long since been hollowed out at the UG level, becoming a code word for “general education” or “rigorous mental training” coupled with high academic prestige and a shot at upward mobility. IITs do not produce many engineers from their much-vaunted undergraduate program, but they do produce some winners in a society that has desperately few avenues for winning. Running this rat race is what focuses the minds of the undergraduate and their guardians.

In this way, “engineering” in India has become the equivalent of what Greek and Latin stood for up to the late 19th century in English and American higher education: a skill that was intrinsically useless but technically difficult, valued as a symbol of “being educated”, a credential providing access to the professions. Engineering in its essence is obviously not useless, but it has been made useless in India for a whole host of reasons such as our failed industrial policy, the ease of the brain drain to the service-sector dominated Anglosphere, and the caste-based hierarchy between mental and manual labour.