In the US, Universities  are basically the research centers for various corporations.

Arts and humanities departments may be supported by the government funding and the fees collected by the students. However, once you move on to Science, Math, Engineering and Technology schools, revenue from corporations is a major source of income for the university.

As I have mentioned, internships play a huge role in this where the students get to work at corporations during the summer for three or four months gaining important experience in corporate culture, and on the job training. This helps the company to evaluate the student as a potential employee.

Another kind of internship is a Co-op where the student works for a company for extended periods of times from six months to over a year and also get academic credit for the on the job training that he receives. The companies pay the student as well as the university for the program.

The third way is the one in which the Universities get the research done for the corporations. Usually the corporations help set up the labs and other facilities and pay the student and the department for their service. This ensures two things that has been a weakness in our system. Firstly it obviously gives the students industry relevant experience while assisting them in learning the latest technology. Secondly, the same is true for the professors, since they are also kept up to date on the cutting edge of technology.  This eliminates the current problem of lecturers teaching computer science that they learned in 1998 when they were in college.

Another way that we can easily initiate this process is through the academic projects that we have. The universities/colleges should work with the industry to get actual projects for the students. It is a win-win situation. Students get paid or get their fees paid by the companies and they get to do some industry relevant actual research that produces high quality stuff rather than copying some old project from some friend or from internet to get the requirements met . The companies get their work done and could possibly hire these students if they are satisfied with the performance.

The best solution to the question of the lecturers being out of touch with the latest developments is the sytem of Guest Lecturer in the US. No, I am not talking about hiring temporary lecturers at a cheap rate to fill in the schedule that I’ve encountered in some colleges in Kerala. These are experienced people from the Industry coming to the college to teach subjects for a semester. These subjects will be designed by them so that it covers what happens in their company/industry.  Of course, it would involve getting rid of the syndicate system where a bunch of folks at the university fixes the syllabus. It has been expceptionally great where I found this engineer from International Trucks (A manufacturer of long haul trucks and diesel engines) was at Mechanical Engineering department teaching internal combustion engines. And no, she did not use some archaic text book. She used shop drawings from her company augmented by visits to the company occassionally to demonstrate the real thing.

These are not some wild ideas that I drew up from thin air. These are stuff that works, and I’ve witnessed them first hand.  Can we get that done in India? Well… we are not going to amount to anything if we set the bar too low.