The quality of the IITs - some (anecdotal) supporting evidence

Via Naveen Koorakula, who also happens to be an IITian, I came across a link to this somewhat peculiar story on a conversation between an IIT graduate and a rickshaw driver. I don't have the time to translate it (the conversation is in Hindi) but it is really quite the interesting chat.

I would like to present this as supporting evidence of my previous claim regarding the public reputation of the IITs. I am, of course, using public information (the reputation thing) such as this, and so it is theoretically possible that there is some privately held information which would show that this public information is, in fact, false. But given the transparency of the admission process, this seems highly unlikely. It is possible that someone is somehow tampering with the admission process while being careful enough to leave no traces of the act. But evidence for this would be very easy to find - from time to time, you would get an utter idiot who somehow manages to sneak in - but evidence such as this has, thus far, not been forthcoming.

It is very hard for me, therefore, to reject the hypothesis that the public reputation of the IITs is due to its high quality.

=+=

There were two rickshaw-walas vying for our business when we wanted to go to Sankat-Mochan temple in Benaras. I agreed to go with the one who was about 20, seemed like a regular young rickshaw-wala, but I found something interesting about this fellow in his eyes. I was not proved wrong.
He wanted Rs 50, we said Rs 30. We settled for 40. Here are the highlights of the conversation that ensued while he rode the rickshaw:

Have the subsidies given to IITs been a good investment for the Indian government? - Further comments

Five further comments on the IIT post (I am moving my blog updates from Thursday into a post of its own and have added a fifth comment):

Comment 1: A very short analysis of what is wrong with Atanu Dey's argument : He assumes that education in the sciences does not have any value over and beyond getting into a university, institute or college, and he also assumes that education does not have sufficiently large positive externalities. That $1.3 billion estimate by Atanu Dey is a measure of value added to the Indian economy, not value destroyed. If the IITs were not there, this sector of the economy would not exist and so that is a net gain to the economy as a whole. The value of the education that students in these coaching classes get should be measured not in terms of whether they actually get into IIT but in terms of what value they get from it over their lifetimes.

Comment 2: Fixed up some typos. Note that $1.3 billion is a measure of the value added to the Indian economy, not an estimate. A measure simply gives you some idea of the variable being measured whereas an estimate must be at least somewhere in the ballpark of the actual value of the variable being measured.

Comment 3: It is not really very time optimal for me right now - given that I am on a long-awaited vacation and given my various other commitments - to spend any more time on this, and so I am going to be brief. Here are some very brief overall remarks on the matter of the IITs.

1. A more rigorous analysis is called for to make the sort of bold claims that Atanu is making: It would be useful to take a look at the balamce sheets of the some of the companies I mentioned - Infosys - et cetera to get some idea of the size of the numbers in question when comparing costs (the cost per year of umdergraduate education vi the IITs) and benefits (the net taxes being paid by the IT companies in India). At any rate, to do any convincing on this matter, a more rigorous analysis is called for which makes clear what, if any, were the assumptions made in the analysis.

I am prepared to agree with almost anyone but I don't think I have enough reason to do so in this case. If you read any economics paper in any of the management journals, you at least have some idea of where the disagreements may lie. These posts are surely not well argued and seem to be full of holes. Now, whether these holes cold be later papered over is not the question. The executive summary, the thesis and the supporting arguments have to be front and center in the posts. Furthermore, there has to be some technical paper of some sort somewhere that tells me what the model being used is. So far, I have found very little.

2. Quick-and-dirty back-of-the-envelope calculations seem to indicate the IITs to be a good investment: Basically, here is how I did my back-of-the-envelope calculation. I just took a look at the balance sheets of Infosys and some of the other software companies, and used that to get some ballpark estimates of the benefits of the IITs. I wish I had more time to write up an actual post, but I leave this as an exercise for the reader. Just draw up an Excel spreadsheet listing out the cost factor, apply some time discounting of costs in the past and add some reasonable premium to just be conservative. The aim here is to get a very rough ballpark estimate of the net cost of the investment. Assume that a portion of the taxes paid by (I sometimes hate to use the word 'rent' because it is so non-specific in terms of actual numbers) some of the software behemoths is attributable to the 'founder effect'. (Nobody wanted to invest in Narayana Murthy's company when it was small. Trust me on this one. He came to a number of professors' faculty houses at IIMA to get some initial investment for the firm now known as Infosys. Very few wanted to invest.) This is because the only reason he even got his foot in the door was because he had an academic background from the IITs. You now have some idea of the benefits accrued. By way of comparison, Pakistan and Bangladesh don't have the IITs and don't have an IT industry to speak of either.

3. Small investment value: We are not talking about massive dollar investments here. There actually isn't a whole lot of corruption in the IITs and so the money actually gets spent on what it is set aside for. One must really believe that the Indian gvoernment is going to be able to better utilize the 30 million dollars or so it spends on each IIT since that is after all the opportunity cost of the investment. And to agree with the opportunity cost argument, one must believe - and I am not prepared to believe it - that there will be little or no corruption involved. 30 million dollars after the pigs have fed at the trough would be something like 5 million dollars - if you are lucky. (That is about 1/3th of the Las Vegas buffet's cost. Just sayin') I fail to see how this could bring about anything like the sort of results one can reasonably attribute to the IITs.

Comment 4: What are some empirically sound things that one could say about the IITs. a) They are probably never going to feature very high in World Rankings of Universities; b) The very high selectivity of the undergraduate program (at least until the mid-2000's) creates an undergraduate student population that is high in terms of motivation, scientific and/or technological talent and application, and given the very high level of selectivity, the undergraduate student population is - on academic terms- comparable to the student population in other institutes of technology such as MIT and Caltech ; c) The students in the Masters programs are harder to empirically analyze since less is known about them other than the fact that their entrance exam scores are high (the GATE entrance exams used to be multiple-choice and choosing people based on multiple-choice tests usually leads to skewed populations). This does not mean that they are less smart. It just means that we have a population that is harder to make strong statements regarding.

Comment 5: A couple of things that have not been sufficiently addressed in the arguments on IITs : the matter of the PhDs and this other business of public reputation. First, the PhDs. It is odd to completely ignore the PhDs in any analysis of an academic department or institution. What one would expect here is that (a) low investment research areas (projects in computer science can be very low investment) would be of excellent quality and (b) the quality of PhD theses in these areas would also be of very high quality. This is, in fact, what one sees. The Database Group at IIT Mumbai is very strong and is arguably one of the world's best. The PhD theses in theoretical computer science are often excellent as well. And second, the matter of public reputation. It would be very odd if an academic institution could sustain a very high public reputation over decades and yet have serious organizational failures. If anything, the IITs are a good example of how governments can run high performance organizations. If it is indeed the case that the IITs suffer from major organizational failures (just keep it real, folks!), then it is, by all means, okay to post about these. But nothing I have read so far in the couple of posts that I have gone through seems to suggest that major organizational failures actually exist. And finally, an acknowledgement : the phrasing "a good investment for the Indian government" is due to Prof. Ananth Raman at HBS.

Have the subsidies given to IITs been a good investment for the Indian government?

So I emailed Prof. Ananth Raman, Professor at Harvard Business School and alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, regarding the IITs. The matter in question is whether the IITs have been a good investment for the Indian government. The short answer to the question is "Yes". Prof. Ananth Raman concurs with me on this matter.

My email to him is pasted below. Please note that the EdNotes (in italics) were added by me later in preparation for this blog post. Please note the typo in the usage of the word 'alumnae'. The correct term is 'alumni'. One of the great things about having been to Stanford and Harvard is that when you have typos in your emails, people do the auto-correction themselves. Stanford + Harvard joint reference FTW! 

I should add that I was at the Bacchanal buffet yesterday in Las Vegas. How much did the buffet cost to build? 17 MILLION DOLLARS. Two buffets such as this one and we are already there. In this age of easy, I wonder how anyone can believe that an investment in STEM education that amounts to less than 40 million dollars such as this one could be considered a bad one. Remember that we are talking about the Indian economy which is a >$1.8 trillion dollar economy in nominal terms and a >$4.5 trillion dollar economy in PPP terms. 

I fail to see Atanu's point regarding welfare maximization. How could the cost of the coaching classes be considered welfare decreasing even from a purely neo-classical point of view? I mean - let's forget about institutions. Let us do a simple purely self-interest based analysis. Here is a large number of people who independently, freely choose to spend money on a service. Would they do it if the option was not increasing their utility? And if it is increasing the utility of so many people, then how could the activity be welfare decreasing? I don't want to spend any more time reading through Atanu Dey's numerous posts on this topic. There are times when one must decide that there are other things that are a better use of one's time and this, frankly, is one of them.

P.S. This may well be the first ever post on the Indian economy which uses the sentence "Stanford + Harvard joint reference FTW!".

-+-

Dear Prof. Ananth Raman,

I trust this finds you well.

I recently came across a blog post by Berkeley Ph.D. Atanu Dey arguing that the IITs are : (a) "not all that they are cracked up to be" (which is a safe thing for anyone to say since it could mean anything); (b) a net welfare loss for the economy as a whole (wow! I mean, wow!) (EdNote: Exact quote from Atanu Dey : "One of my major points is that the subsidies given to IITs (and other tertiary education institutes) is regressive and welfare decreasing.") and (c) a drain on the economy since they represent a 'subsidy' and so the subsidy should, of course, be stopped (Link : http://www.deeshaa.org/2013/03/29/the-iits-are-not-really-what-they-are-cracked-up-to-be/).

This sounds like one of those loony rightwing talking points memos which propose tax cuts as a solution for everything, and I say this even though my political beliefs are somewhat to the right of center even in America. To put it really bluntly, I find the post to be almost entirely nonsensical. IITs have turned up in a couple (if not more) of our discussions in the past (and speaking of our conversations, I must confess that I did not quite pick up on your cues on IIT during my conversations with you - there are several reasons for that which I shall not get into). Anyway, as alumnae (EdNote: sic), I hope I may broach the matter of whether the IITs should be paid for the Indian government (EdNote: <stuff deleted>).

n-ary variables

One problem with the concept of binary oppositions is that it seems to imply that Western philosophical thought is concerned only with two-valued quantities. For instance, a coin toss X is an event that may be represented as follows.

X = { H, T }.

Other two valued quantities :

X1 = {"good", "evil" }
X2 = {"on",   "off"  }
X3 = {"left", "right" }

Note that these are all the examples from the Wikipedia article on "binary opposition".
However, some variables can take three values.

Y = { +, - , 0 }

Y1 = {"good", "evil", "neither good nor evil"}
Y2 = {"on", "off", "neither on or off"}
Y3 = {"left", "right", "neither left nor right"}

You could have a N valued quantity for many different values of N. Here are two
examples of seven valued quantities.

Z1 = {"M", "T", "W", "R", "F", "S", "N" } --> for the days of the week
Z2 = {"black", "white", "American Indian", "Asian Indian", "Chinese", "Filipino", "Samoan"}

Western philosophical thought has ben concerned with seven valued quantities as well. As, for instance, in any analysis in which days of the week enters the picture. Also, some of the quantities that Western philosophical thought has considered have been continuous variables as well.

Speed of Zeno's arrow = {x | x >= 0 }
Velocity of Zeno's arrow = {x1 | -infinity < x < +infinity}

The problem of continuous quantities  has not been considered by Jacques Derrida. Note that if the example of 'left' and 'right' given in the Wikipedia article on binary oppositions was intended to refer to political preferences, please note that individual political preferences may be considered multi-dimensional (some varying level of authoritarianism on one axis and another varying level of left-versus-right on another axis - as for example in PoliticalCompass.org's PoliticalCompass thing) and so the idea of 'left' and 'right' may be approximations too. The reason I am bringing this stuff up is that it is entirely unclear why Derrida manages to get so much attention when his theory leaves so much out.

Comment : 3QD comment on Derrida

Here are my comments on Derrida posted on "Three Quarks Daily" (slightly edited).

=+=

As recreation while preparing for a graduate program at a certain business school, I was reading a bit of Derrida. I was not impressed.

I, for one, continue to be underwhelmed by virtually all of Derrida's 'theories'. It is unclear to me that his contributions to modern thought, and that of the deconstructionists, amounts to anything more than the following single sentence. "A line of text can be amibiguous in meaning."

Other than that totally trivial observation, it beats me what Derrida has really said or contributed to the world of intellectual thought. Indeed, I would term Derrida's work philosophizing for the lazy intellectual. 'Lazy' because a good analysis based on mathematics and statistics would resolve these 'binary oppositions' that Derrida talks about. If there were "binary opposition"s and they were a construction of the "West", then how could the same sort of analytical tools that are used in the "West" are also effective in the "East" - e.g. in countries like India and China?

n-ary oppositions

I am coining a new term in the field of deconstructionism and in the field of Western philosophical thought. It is the term "n-ary opposition". It is, I believe, a new concept for Western philosophy. Below is an explanation of n-ary opposition. To be honest, it is a bit of a cut-and-paste of the Wikipedia entry for "binary opposition". But I am perfectly serious about all of this.

=+=

N-ary opposition


In critical theory, an n-ary opposition (also n-ary system) is a set of n related terms or concepts which are spread over a 'spectrum' of meaning. The term, introduced by the columnist Anand Manikutty, is also used to refer to the opposition that exists among the n concepts. Binary and ternary oppositions are common types of n-ary oppositions. A binary opposition is a set of two related terms or concepts which are opposite in meaning. A ternary opposition is a set of three related terms or concepts. A ternary opposition may be a set of three related terms of concepts out of which two are opposite in meaning and the third is a null concept. Ternary opposition, also a term introduced by Anand Manikutty, is the system by which, in language and thought, three theoretical opposites are strictly defined and set off agsinst one another. It is the contrast between three mutually exclusive terms, such as positive, negative and zero. Another example : up, down and "middle" (although various other terms may be used in place of "middle" such as zero position). A third example is left, right and "middle". Again, various other terms may be used in place of "middle".

N-ary opposition is proposed as an important concept within structuralism which sees such distinctions as fundamental to all language and thought. In this extension of structuralism, a n-ary opposition is seen as a fundamental organizer of human philosophy, culture and language.

Office hours for November -- and biases in American academia (gasp!)

The office hours for November are on November 5. The next office hours are on November 19, December 3 and December 17 between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Office hours have usually been on the first Monday of every month between 7:30 and 8:15 a.m. Additional office hour times have been added for November and December.

The theme for November will be "Politics and Religion". Over the month of November, I will be proposing a new theory of  Hindu Studies. I call it the Bias Theory of Hindu Studies. (I am hoping that people won't call it the Racial Bias Theory of Hinduism Academia -- although racial biases are part of the picture.) I will be making the argument that at least part of the problem for Hinduism scholars is that they have biases that they are not able to overcome. (Implicit racial biases may be part of the picture although racial biases do not represent the entirety of the matter). But this is only one part of the overall thesis. The overall thesis is that American universities, as organizations, do not have sufficiently good processes -- processes in the sense of organizational processes. This causes them to produce products that have a quality problem overall. The product in question is, of course, papers and such produced by Hindu Studies scholars. And although this area has half-beaten to death by a number of people, I believe that what I am proposing is novel. Wendy Doniger, Rajiv Malhotra, Balagangadhara, Paul Courtright, Russell McCutcheon - not a single one of them has really come up with the argument that I will be making as part of this thesis. None of them. And the funny thing is that they are all really quite fundamentally mistaken. Each and every one of them.

Anyhoo, besides Hindu Studies, this theory has significant applicability to American academia in general as well. I have laid out the basic arguments in one of the papers that I recently wrote which should probably called the Bias Theory of American Academia. In fact, one of the reasons I am quite happy to take the time to write these posts although I am extremely busy right now is that I have already written up the paper and so I know exactly what I am going to say. That is about it for an introduction. The first post will be up shortly.

Update (Nov. 11): Note that I am only promising to kick off my proposal this month. I am planning to make this into a two month series. The first series of posts will be this month. The second series of posts will be scheduled for a future month.

Update (Dec 3rd): The theme for November is "Politics and religion" and the subtitle for the theme for November is "-- and all the things you are not supposed to discuss at work."

Panini, de Saussure, Chomsky et cetera

A followup on the "Pizza and Panini" piece. The "Pizza and Panini" piece is a sly comment on the Eurocentricity of the way we view contributions to science by the ancient Greeks versus the ancient Indians. Panini was, in my opinion, one of the greatest innovators in the ancient world. His grammar was the world's first formal system of language. Panini's ideas of formal rules in natural languages, in fact, significantly influenced the 19th and 20th century linguists who came after him - de Saussure's work (de Saussure,1894) and Chomsky's (Chomsky, 1957).

I am also poking a bit of fun at the lengthiness of some of the works of the ancient Greek mathematicians, scientists and even philosophers. Many of their dialogues appear unnecessary lengthy when viewed by us today. This is because the ancient Greeks had not yet developed the theories of languages, physics, et cetera that were developed after the European Enlightenment. If Euclid's propositions were analyzed today, we would find that they could have been written far more compactly. Two examples follow. The stuff in italics is all that would have been required for a Proof or Algorithm for the two Propositions of Euclid that I deal with below.

Pizza and Panini

Indiatimes' main page is carrying an edited version of the latest installment of our mathematics column entitled "Pizza and Panini". It is written in the style of the New Yorker. Hope you enjoyed reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it. (For those who came in late, Chandrayaan-12 is the rocket on which Anand and Ravi are traveling.) Please send in your answers to the puzzle in the column to the following email address : askthedelphicoracle@gmail.com. Happy solving!

PIZZA AND PANINI

This article is in collaboration with Prof. Krishnan Shankar, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oklahoma.

The Oracle Asks

The Sanskrit grammarian Panini is at his friend Socrates’ place in Athens.

-+- 

Boy. Here is the tea.

Socrates. Thank you.

Panini. The boy, he understands Greek Mathematics, does he not?



Socrates. Yes, indeed; he was born in the house.



Panini. Can you talk to him about mathematics?

Soc. Certainly. Attend now to the questions which I ask him, and observe whether he learns of me or only remembers.

 

Pizza and Panini

The third installment of our column is coming up at the Times of India. And to give you an update on the TEDx talk - my preparations for the TEDx talk are coming along well. Tomorrow, I am scheduled to talk to Nori Gerardo Lietz, an expert on world real estate markets here at Stanford. So exciting!

I expect to have an interesting talk with her and I imagine she would have some very interesting things to say on the topic, which <drumroll> is "Why there are cows on the street in India?" Anyway, the latest installment of our column is almost there. Hope you enjoy this month's puzzle.