Key Points
New Delhi: The number of students applying for doctoral seats in some of the top-ranking Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) has dropped drastically in the past decade or so, according to a working paper by IIT-Bombay professor D. Manjunath...
Specifically, we are investigating the hypothesis that there is an ongoing and gradual decline in interest among our undergraduates to pursue a PhD in Science and Engineering at the premier institutions in India, the professor, who is part of IIT Bombays Department of Electrical Engineering, writes in the paper, which he has circulated among colleagues teaching at various technical institutions...
The working paper, based on publicly available data, lists several factors such as a rise in the number of students going abroad, students pursuing government jobs, and the declining quality of Masters programmes as possible reasons for the decline in the number of applications for PhD courses...
According to Professor Manjunaths paper, at IIT Madras, the number of PhD applications in the field of mechanical engineering increased from 650 in 2012 to 3,600 in 2015 and then dropped to 820 in 2022..
Elaborating on his stand that the quality of PhD applicants has also gone down, Professor Manjunath writes in his paper that many Masters programmes offered by IITs and other technical institutionsare now in dire straits, adding that: In most of the popular departments, the number of students that start the programme in July, the beginning of the academic year, would have dwindled down to about half to one third by the end of the first semester...
