Social sciences career choices – Digging around for a root cause

by India-Reports on February 22, 2010

in Future Growth & Global Transitions, work in transition

I gaped at my interviewer looking for a seemingly smart answer to this often discussed question “So, why do you think engineering and technology is so popular in India and social sciences are not”. While employability of the graduates and a prosperous future career growth appears to be two dominant reasons, the topic warrants a little more thought.

One of my friends, who had secured highest marks in Economics in class 12th, applied for an admission to a prestigious college in Chennai. He was fairly confident that with his credentials he would surely get an admission. Months later, with no news from the college, he asked around only to learn that he was denied of admission because he did not come to college and meet the faculty enough to influence the admission process. Apparently, being the best in economics was not enough to get an admission. He chose to do his own business. Stories like this are discouraging yet very common in social sciences and arts subjects such as economics, finance, arts, communication, and media. More often then not colleges act as financial institutions with the sole motif of profit then with a goal to promote the right talent. Fundamentally, for a field of education to be popular, its fellow aspirants need to have faith in the education system responsible for it. Students and parents alike nee d to be assured that perseverance and intelligence are always going to be appropriately rewarded. Meritocracy and a transparent admission process are two fundamental corner stones of any educational institution, especially higher education. Absence of these two leads to less deserving students becoming successful at the cost of the brighter lot and over a period of time, disreputing the educational system.

Contrast this with the admission process for engineering schools, be it IITs or NITs where students have to write an entrance exam and disciplines are allocated based on their ranks. A fairly straight forward admission process assuring utmost transparency and is only merit driven. In fact, there are jokes running the rounds in IITs that one can make in to IIT with political influence and money. The stark disparity between the admission process between social sciences and engineering and the subsequent effects of it, are not without a reason though. Take for example the B-school admission process in India.

Harvard Business school received approximately 9000 applications in the year 2009 for its MBA program, as compared to almost 2,40,000 student who wrote the CAT exams in the same year. A country like india, where millions of students compete for a handful no of seats, faces additional challenges in the selection process. Most B-schools in US have descriptive essays in the application allowing students to express their ambitions and experiences much better then what IIMs let its aspirants do. The whole evaluation process in schools like Harvard is almost a year long process comprising of a lengthy application, recommendations and work experience. IIMs have struggled hard to look beyond the mere percentile. Of course, if IIMs or IITs start to adopt a similar application process, they would take years to evaluate the answers and publish a fair results. On the contrary and more deservingly, the CAT exam went online in 2009, allowing no faculty involvement in the evaluation process and most other MBA entrance exams have OMR sheets. While the admission process seem to have worked for business studies and engineering, social sciences have crippled with the lack of a scalable admission process.

It is almost impossible to design examinations like the online CAT for social sciences and arts subjects. Economics, finance, arts, law, and media tend to be subjective in nature. The CLAT (Common Law Admission Test) for higher studies asks its students to write two essays in addition to testing students english language skills at depth.
Given these skills to test, designing an entrance exam similar to the CAT/AIEEE wont do justice to the breadth and depth of these subjects. The answers and questions in these subjects, unlike engineering, do not have a clear right or wrong answer, rather they need to be descriptive and evaluated in light of several other perspectives. If a similar number of students were to write a commerce exam, it would need a proportional numbers of faculties to evulate the papers. Even if that problem is solved, the marks needs to be normalized across all students to ensure that two equally good answers get the same treatment. These are hard problems to solve and the social sciences institutions have struggled since ages to ensure fairness and transparency.

These problems, over the ages, has evolved in to an unfair admission process where students and colleges alike have resorted in to unfair admission processes. This has led to a scenario where lots of bright artists, journalists or economists have only been moderately successful. Given this, no parent would want their kids to choose these as a career option where talent and perseverance can not guarantee success. For most engineering and technology firms, the IITs and NITs are mere screening criteria; it helps them spot the right talent. Such a thing is hardly possible for fields such as journalism, media, law etc. All these have led to students loosing faith in the discipline. For India to make the social sciences and arts a popular choice for higher education discipline, the education sectors needs to first innovate on how it can ensure a fair and transparent admission process to its students. Of course, this will not bring euphoria to all the aspirants but still will certainly go a long way in instilling faith in the institutions.

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