Basic Sciences vs. Engineering

As I have pointed out earlier the attitude towards and trends in basic sciences are a matter of concern. In this post I will reflect more on this topic.

Starting from 50's till about early 80's the talent was equally distributed between basic sciences and engineering, primarily due to lack of opportunities and a huge demand supply gap. Many of the scholars ended up choosing teaching as a profession, still managing to maintain the educational ecosystem to a large degree. By the time I decided to go to college (in early 80's), a BS in basic sciences / maths was accompanied with a tag of failure. It was a common perception that all bright students got admission in engineering ! I think this is where things start to go wrong...

By 1990's, the government had largely liberalized the "ecosystem of technical education". Many options opened up for students, virtually squeezing majority (I would not say all, because few people remained by choice OR ignorance) of the good talent out of the basic science streams.

The rest of it is only hypothesis, without any concrete data, but it is also the most probable scenario in future. I think this is how our future will look like :

• Increasing financial returns, disproportionate to the individual ability will erode the value of education (happened in most of the societies, where high growth created large opportunities). Since opportunities are abundant, students will have lesser incentive to learn...
  
• Also, given the current incentive levels of an average teacher, education no longer looks an exciting career option.
• So we are likely to enter into a negative spiral where falling education standards and an indifferent teaching staff will reinforce each other; eroding our long term competitiveness.

There is another important relationship, which needs to be understood. All technologies / systems go through a continuous improvement process till they become commodity. This phase is usually driven by engineering, but the major disruption comes from fundamental breakthrough in sciences. This implies that excellence in science is essential for making big leaps in competitiveness.

What is the way out ? There are no easy answers in a country with billion people and hence any radical change at the ground level requires huge investment. But many of us can start to change things around us. Even if each one of us can influence 10 others in the community / close relatives, it would make a huge difference...