I am an Indian and I have seen so many worthless engineering colleges. The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well. I can't fathom how easy it is to pass a class in these engineering colleges and how widespread plagiarism is. When >50% points of the class is determined by a single exam that repeats same questions every year, it isn't hard to study for a day and pass the class. I am not kidding, you can buy an "all-in-one" of around 600 pages which is essentially enough to pass or even score 80% in "all the classes" in a semester.
I would say at most 10% of engineering students in India are properly taught and properly tested and rest of them just spend 4 years in college essentially learning nothing. When it is so easy to get an engineering degree, people who barely pass high school also enroll in these programs for "engineering degree" and become an "engineer" after 4 years of college. It's no wonder that most of these "engineers" can't do anything.
> The main issues, at least in my opinion, are "very very" bad teaching and very low incentives for someone to study well.
Another significant element I'd point to is outdated curricula. By way of example, many Indian CS course materials still require students to use Turbo C++ -- an IDE from the mid-1990s which runs under DOS. Needless to say, what ends up being taught is hardly representative of modern practices.
They go hand in hand. A C++ IDE from the mid-1990s implements C++ as it existed in the mid-1990s -- which is a rather different language from that which exists today. No STL, for instance. Without access to modern features of the language, it's inevitable that the course won't end up teaching those features.
Moreover -- the use of a 25-year-old IDE is symptomatic of a more general problem in Indian CS (and probably other) curricula. Many instructors are teaching to a syllabus which was set in stone many years ago. If you look at some of the links I posted in a sibling thread or explore other universities' posted materials, you'll probably see signs of this -- Java courses which still cover applet development is another common one, for instance.
You can find more examples pretty easily. It does look as though some universities are starting to support the Code::Blocks IDE and/or Geany, but not consistently.
I would say at most 10% of engineering students in India are properly taught and properly tested and rest of them just spend 4 years in college essentially learning nothing. When it is so easy to get an engineering degree, people who barely pass high school also enroll in these programs for "engineering degree" and become an "engineer" after 4 years of college. It's no wonder that most of these "engineers" can't do anything.