Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003 00:14:49 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: 60 Minutes show To: age discrimination/H-1B e-newsletter Enclosed is the transcript of the 60 Minutes piece on the IITs. I have lots of comments. As I said on Friday (and have said in the past), I've interacted with a large number of IIT graduates, both as students in my graduate courses and as research colleagues. A few have been truly outstanding, but most have been merely good to excellent. In my opinion, the curriculum at the IITs is not as good as that of top American universities. I have found their course materials pedestrian and often out of date. The IITs' main virtue is their high selectivity. However, the claims being made by the Indians being interviewed here, e.g. Khosla, are incorrect. Khosla, for example, says that no other school in the world has such a low acceptance rate as IIT. That's just false; on the contrary, very low acceptance rates are standard in the top universities in all Third World countries, e.g. China. Again, keep in mind that India has a 50% illiteracy rate. So the low acceptance rates don't mean much. The point made by the Infosys CEO about his son being accepted to Cornell but not IIT has a grain of truth in it, but not really in the way he and Stahl meant. One big advantage the IIT-level (and almost-IIT-level) students have over U.S. applicants to U.S. schools is that the Indians tend to have outstanding English verbal skills. So, they score extremely well on the SAT Verbal. And by the way, it's real, not just a product of the cram schools mentioned below. These kids have an excellent daily working vocabulary. Good for them. But it doesn't mean they are "brilliant" engineers, as claimed here. And by the way, in applying to a private school like Cornell, I'm sure that it didn't hurt Murthy Junior's chances of admission that his father is a wealthy, influential CEO (read, "Someone who will donate a building to us"). (Note added later: It turned out that things were quite a bit more advanced than that. Murthy Senior is a member of the Cornell University Council. See http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/60Mins2.txt That posting, interesting, also reveals that Murthy Senior is not a fan of IIT after all contrary to what he said on 60 Minutes.) Khosla's statement that he "breezed" through Carnegie Mellon University is not quite what it seems either. He had been a EE major as an undergraduate, but was a Biomedical Engineering student at CMU. There is no comparison of depth of subject matter here; any good EE graduate would breeze through a Biomedical Engineering program. If he had been in EE at CMU, he wouldn't have found it "breezy" at all. And by the way, although it's true that Khosla co-founded Sun Microsystems, he only played the entrepreneurial role; the technological stuff was done by two other founders, Bechtolsheim and Joy. And when he says that Indians have played a "leading" role in so many companies, that isn't quite what it seems either. The industry lobbyists, for instance, like to claim that Sun's SPARC chip was designed by an Indian, Agarwal, but the fact is that it was first designed by a team of graduate students at UC Berkeley, working under Prof. David Patterson. Sun then picked up the design and kept refining it over the years; Agarwal joined in somewhere in the middle. There have always been hundreds of people working on the chip at any given time, and NO ONE is indispensable. No COMPANY is indispensable either. So when these guys claim that Indians increased the net number of jobs in Silicon Valley through entrepreneurship, they are incorrect. If Indian firm X were not in Silicon Valley, the slack would have been taken up, either through the other firms being larger, or by other entrepreneurship. I must say that the Infosys example rankled me, especially in the context of mentioning Sun Microsystems. I just learned recently that Sun often gets its main job applicants from Infosys, as H-1Bs, and interviews them specifically because they are cheaper than American applicants. And it is certainly possible that the Khosla himself is responsible for this Sun/Infosys connection. Ethnic hiring is very common in Silicon Valley--one sees whole divisions, or even whole companies, which are either all Indian or all Chinese or all Russian; this of course is no coincidence. Part of that is cronyism and part is nationalistic pride. The latter point is key. The Indians' pride at becoming so influential in the U.S. comes through loud and clear in this 60 Minutes piece. (Though you have to see the video to see Stahl's "Oh my gosh" fawning.) I fully understand that, and can sympathize. Their feeling is "Here is India, finally standing up with power," and one can't blame them for their pride. Again, good for them. However, it also leads to cronyism, as I said before, and the wearing of blinders. It leads to a mentality in which everyone is automatically "brilliant," etc. This is not good. I hope 60 Minutes will see fit to show the other side of the H-1B coin (as they did in the early 1990s). I think it's pretty clear that this embarrassingly overblown puff piece came as a result of some slick PR work by the Indian chauvinists and/or the industry lobbyists. It's sad that the AFL-CIO, an organization that does have the power and connections to be able to get 60 Minutes' attention on this issue, has never been willing to back up its criticism of the H-1B program with actual use of even a little bit of its resources. Norm (Transcript omitted. It is posted at http://www.indianembassy.org/US_Media/2003/mar/cbs_iit.shtml) Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2003 23:03:23 -0800 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: Murthy, Cornell, IIT--"the rest of the story" To: age discrimination/H-1B/L-1 e-newsletter Recall that a couple of months ago I made some very critical comments here about a 60 Minutes puff piece on the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT). To hear 60 Minutes tell it, all IIT grads are geniuses, and Silicon Valley would be helpless without them. My point was that yes, a few IIT grads are indeed extraordinarily talented, but most are merely good, on a par with many good American students, but not the u"ber intellects claimed by 60 Minutes. AsiaWeek magazine rated IIT only third-rank just in Asia, let alone the rest of the world. I don't think their survey was very good, but the point is that the curriculum in the IITs is often pedestrian and out of date, and neither the curriculum nor the faculty can match any of the top universities in the U.S. The IIT faculty haven't produced the seminal research papers, the breakthrough patents, the authoritative textbooks which the faculty of any world-class university should have. I said that I can sympathize with the Indo-American immigrants who are proud that India has made a lot of economic progress. Good for them. But I resent hype, especially hype deliberately set up by expensive PR firms. It turned out that the 60 Minutes piece came out at a time during which there was a big PR push to promote what the Indians called "Brand IIT." It is very disappointing to see 60 Minutes, a show I generally find to be informative, to be presenting such a fawning, unbalanced advertisement under the guise of "news." (60 Minutes says that they did the show not at the behest of the PR firm, but rather "at the suggestion of an Indian doctor.") Now enclosed below is an article from an Indian magazine, sent to me by a reader, which shows the 60 Minutes fiasco to be even worse than it had first appeared. Here is what is going on: The 60 Minutes episode had included quite a bit of interview with Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys, singing the praises of IIT as being not only the best in the world, but even "out of this world." He cited the example of his own son, who was not good enough to get into IIT but was easily accepted into Cornell. Leslie Stahl, the interviewer, responded in a gee-whiz tone, "Oh my gosh...Cornell was his SAFETY SCHOOL?!" I responded by saying that (a) Murthy Jr. is getting a better education at Cornell than he would at IIT, and (b) it probably didn't hurt his chances of admission at Cornell to have a rich and famous father, a potential huge donor. Well, it turns out that Murthy Sr. is more than just rich and famous; he's on the Cornell University Council. See http://www.weforum.org/ site/knowledgenavigator.nsf/Content/Murthy%20N.%20R.%20Narayana. But even better, the item enclosed below is an article by Murthy (Sr.) himself, in which he is quite critical of IIT. He says, for instance, When I went to the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, as a graduate student in 1967, the place had an overpowering enthusiasm and energy. However, I do not see this any longer, when I visit some of these institutions today. Over the years, a variety of factors have caused a gradual drying up of talent that goes for technical higher education. This has now become a genuine cause for concern. This sure isn't what he was saying on 60 Minutes. Even better: ...there are fewer students per faculty in the IITs than in American institutions, which have often performed much better than the IITs. Thus, there is considerable scope for increasing the intake of undergraduates... The American institutions "performed better" than IIT? Again, this sure isn't what Murthy told the viewers of 60 Minutes. By the way, the above Web page gives a short bio for Murthy: Personal Profile: 1967, BEng in Electrical Engin., Univ. of Mysore; 1969, Master's degree, Indian Inst. of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. 1981, co-founded Infosys. 1981-2002, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Infosys. Currently, Chairman of the Board and Chief Mentor, Infosys. Member: Prime Minister's Council on Trade and Industry, India; Asian Executive Board, Wharton Business School; Cornell University Council. Achtmeyer Center for Global Leadership, Tuck School for Business. Director, Board of the Reserve Bank of India. Look at all those boards he sits on. This shows why the Indian government doesn't look at the emigration of talented people (Murthy is clearly at least a talented entrepreneur), because among other things it gets "their" people into the U.S. corridors of power. So for example it gets Murthy a forum on 60 Minutes, where he can make statements entirely at odds with what he said "just between us Indians" in the magazine. I admire India for its progress and success. I don't admire lying and manipulation of public opinion/Congress. Norm (Article omitted. See http://www.siliconindia.com/magazine/fullstory.asp?aid=AYS199505448)