Book
International Comparative Study: Engineering Education in India
Papers, presented at 6th Annual ASEE International Forum
The paper is focused on changes in higher engineering education in Russia over the last decade. We assume that, as a result of technological and organizational changes in the markets young engineers are taught to work in, changes in education may be called for. The key change in the markets for engineers in Russia consists of the transition from planned to market economy, and thus the appearance of markets per se, and also in a shift away from a focus on the defense industry. To identify the possible changes and assess the current state of engineering education, we compare opinions of four target groups: university administrators, students, recent graduates, and employers.
In the paper, general approaches to evaluation of quality of engineering education in Russia, stated by expert community, are considered. The authors arrived at the conclusion that attention to internal evaluation mechanism of the education quality in Russian normative framework of higher education system is insufficient, as compared to European higher education practices. A pattern of involving the students in the internal evaluation of higher education quality is submitted to be a tool to develop the quality of engineering education. The pattern is been piloting in the framework of All-Russian project “Involving of Students of Higher Educational Institutions in Evaluation and Development of Education Quality “High-Quality Education”.
The paper explores a suitability of higher education quality measurement from student's point of view, and analyses results of interviewing of students from engineering specialties in Perm universities. Nonlinear Principal Components Analysis (NLPCA) in interpretation of Gifi system was used as the tool for data processing. It takes into account a dissimilar statistical nature of questionnaire indicators. The method can be very promising for various socio-economic researches.
Institutions affect investment decisions, including investments in human capital. Hence institutions are relevant for the allocation of talent. Good market-supporting institutions attract talent to productive value-creating activities, whereas poor ones raise the appeal of rent-seeking. We propose a theoretical model that predicts that more talented individuals are particularly sensitive in their career choices to the quality of institutions, and test these predictions on a sample of around 95 countries of the world. We find a strong positive association between the quality of institutions and graduation of college and university students in science, and an even stronger negative correlation with graduation in law. Our findings are robust to various specifications of empirical models, including smaller samples of former colonies and transition countries. The quality of human capital makes the distinction between educational choices under strong and weak institutions particularly sharp. We show that the allocation of talent is an important link between institutions and growth.