India produces 1.5 million engineering graduates a year. Most of them figure out what to actually learn on their own, after college starts.
I'm doing B.Tech AI/ML right now. In a batch of ~250 students, maybe 20–30 are genuinely trying to build real technical capability beyond exams and placements.
The rest of the system runs on attendance, lab files, PPTs, and placement anxiety. Not on building anything real.
And most of those students aren't lazy. They're directionless. Trying to figure out what to learn, what actually compounds, and how the industry works — through YouTube, Twitter, GitHub, random seniors, and now LLMs.
Here's the strange part: students today have near-unlimited access to knowledge. But access to knowledge is not the same as access to mentorship, environment, or technical culture.
You can learn transformers online. You can't easily learn judgment online.
You can't Google whether your roadmap makes sense, whether your projects are actually good, or whether you're building depth or just collecting buzzwords. That comes from serious peers and mentors. For most Indian CS students, that environment doesn't exist.
This isn't a talent problem.
India's biggest gap isn't intelligence, curriculum, or access to content. It's the absence of high-intensity technical environments outside a tiny elite layer.
Scaler School of Technology and 100x School are genuinely attempting to fix parts of this — better peers, mentorship, industry alignment. But they can't absorb the scale, and for a large chunk of students, they're unaffordable.
So millions of students end up in the same loop: degree for signaling, self-learning for actual capability.
Other countries didn't leave this entirely to chance.
China's 2017 "New Engineering" initiative pushed universities to redesign CS education around AI and modern industry needs. Elite programs at Tsinghua and Peking University now embed students into research much earlier.
The US did it through institutional experimentation — Olin College built a project-first engineering school from scratch, Recurse Center built a self-directed programming environment that engineers often value more than a Master's degree.
In both cases, someone decided the environment had to change at a structural level.
In India, individual students are making that decision alone.
The current "winning move" is: get a degree for signaling, self-learn for actual capability, use the internet and AI to patch the gap manually.
That's not a system. That's students filling institutional holes themselves.
The future of CS education here won't be won by whoever uploads the best course videos. It'll be won by whoever actually solves mentor density, peer quality, employer trust, and real technical culture.
Not content distribution. Environment design.
Curious what actually shifted things for people here — or is everyone still in the patching-holes phase?