Apropos Ajit Balakrishnan's article "The end of colleges' golden age?" (February 11). There is no doubt that education must be tuned to the needs of the society it serves. The needs of the society change continuously and so do the demands from education. However, the education system, especially in India, has been structured more as an academic one, thereby making it too stiff to change easily. In the late 1990s, I happened to meet a faculty member in my engineering alma mater to seek advice for my son's career. I asked him why the institute wasn't increasing the number of seats in computers and information technology (IT) since that field was really booming and especially since students doing engineering in all kinds of disciplines still landed in the software field in large numbers. His response was that the institute was committed to core engineering and could not promote IT at the expense of the former. It is time education is taken over by "real people", rather than being governed by bookish academicians and ignorant bureaucrats.
Kishor Kulkarni Mumbai
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