While the Indian Institute of Science’s (IISc) annual Open Day is meant to showcase its scientific endeavours to the public, it has ended up making the visiting students cringe over the inadequacy of their own curriculum.

Speaking to DH, students from Bengaluru and elsewhere in the state said the IISc’s superior infrastructure and quality of education made them realise the curriculum at their own colleges is obsolete to the point of being harmful.

“The VTU curriculum is so preoccupied with teaching us the theory that it is failing to prepare us for the modern workforce,” said a computer science student from Siddhartha University, Tumakuru.

“Not enough freedom to explore hands-on experimentation. They're still teaching us CAD software, while here at IISc, they’re already working on Artificial Intelligence,” said the student, adding that students watch tech videos on YouTube to build their capabilities.

“It’s better to watch YouTube videos than going to college,” he further said.

The views of third-year telecommunications students from Mysuru’s GSSS Women’s Engineering College were not any different. They had just walked out of Department of Electrical Communication Engineering (ECE), where they watched a 5G demonstrator system using lasers set up by IISc students.

“There’s an ocean of difference between what’s being taught at IISc and in our colleges. It’s better if the VTU system is dismantled,” said one of the students.

Some Bengaluru students said the gap has put them ten years behind in education and six years backwards in learning instrumentation capabilities.

A third-year Dayananda Sagar University student said the autonomous nature of their institution has made changes in curriculum possible, but it still falls well short of the IISc standards.

“Is the system neglecting our education? Absolutely,” he said. “It’s leaving the industries to fill the capability gap in post-educational training. But none of the top companies even bother recruiting from our college. This has created a generation of students who get degrees but not jobs.”