This Jun 2, 2025 we have a rank list of gifted and hardworking Indians who were able to ace the JEE advanced exam. So what prize do we award 99.99 percentilers who displayed their merit? A "tuition fee" for the next 4-5 years. This debt leaves students with little option to take risk and innovate. Many students follow the money and take up jobs unrelated to their study program.  

Student debt was not always the case. I personally had the good fortune of receiving subsidized education, earned a well paying summer internship in Canada through the startup culture in IITM, and the network of my IIT professor helped me land a 6-month research traineeship in the Netherlands after my graduation. I have worked more than a decade in Europe, and have brought more money to India through foreign remittances than the subsidy I got from the Indian government. However, the present generation of IIT graduates are in a starkly different world:

1) The student fee to GDP per capita ratio is high,

2) Foreign governments are closing their doors to immigration and thus it will take longer to repay debt on an Indian salary, 

3) AI is disrupting the job market.

The solution: Recruit students as trainees from day-0, instead of putting them through a 4 year coursework, pay them a stipend, and get them down to work on impactful and feasible mini-projects. If we can pay army trainees, we can definitely pay our meritorious students to work on problems that matter. This would be better than the current system where most IITians unfortunately do not work in the core engineering discipline that they either chose or were allotted to study for 4-5 years. Thus, let us give young bright minds a fair chance at honing their engineering skills towards immediate impact.

Is a traineeship model financially viable?

Yes, I believe that many of our meritorious students can rise up to a challenge and build profitable products when given the opportunity. This model could be a hybrid between Industrial training institutes and a Professional doctorate in Engineering. It requires innovation and due diligence from the faculty and industry partners. IITM in fact awarded a stipend for its merit scholars to get trained, in 1959, when it had German faculty. In 2025, some AI agent can be built to match a huge database of Industry needs with a concentrated selection of coursework. 

Students may be trained by industry professionals, similar to the "earn and learn" model followed by Chartered Accountants. In my personal capacity, I offer high-school dropouts 6-month traineeships that pay between 5k-20k per month to work on projects leveraging AI to get certified as a "Chartered AI Controller" (https://chimera.university/caic). Industrialists like Mahindra could also set up innovative "Chartered Engineer" traineeships, instead of selling tuition-based degrees. But only our government has the deep pockets and credibility to offer multi-year traineeships, and the time is ticking - technology would evolve at such a rapid pace in the next decade, that universities all over the world have to reinvent themselves.