Friday, January 06, 2006

Sixty Minutes on IIT - CBS

...the smartest, most successful, most influential Indians who've migrated to the US seem to share a common credential: They're graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, better known as IIT. Made up of seven campuses throughout India, IIT may be the most important university you've never heard of ... This is IIT Bombay. Put Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in India ... With a population of over a billion people in India, competition to get into the IIT is ferocious. Last year, 178,000 high school seniors took the entrance exam called the JEE. Just over 3,500 were accepted or less than 2 percent. Compare that with Harvard, say, which accepts about 10 percent of its applicants...impact of IIT graduates has been on the American technology revolution ... "I can't imagine a major area where Indian IIT engineers haven't played a leading role "... It isn't just high tech ... Fortune 500 headhunters are always on the lookout for that IIT degree ... And the American companies love the kids from IIT ... Nehru, India's first prime minister, created IIT 50 years ago just after independence to train the scientists and engineers he knew the nation would need to move from medieval to modern. He never imagined India would be supplying brainpower to the whole world ...

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