Sunday, February 23, 2014

Campus start-ups should matter more than placements

Graduating students from Ivy League colleges start Google, Facebook, Instagram, but the trend in India has been far less

The quest in campuses becomes one of getting employed and to fit into a set groove rather than experimenting, learning and growing. Photo: Mint

If you do not take a risk how will you succeed? These are the not the words of a management guru but of 23-year-old Puneet Gupta , the co-founder of My Epoch (myepoch.in), a start-up in Delhi. Gupta and co-founder Praneet Singh Sahai are graduates of institutes where the track record of students going for high-paying campus placements and further studies in the West is well-accepted and well-documented. They have spurned it all to set up a company to address a market need of yearbooks at colleges, something that ventures beyond engineering into a creative space like design.

In the West, we have seen graduating students from Ivy League colleges start Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc., but the trend in India has been far less. Colleges want to boast of a 100% placement rate and newspapers often feature extravagant starting salaries of fresh graduates’ on their front pages. The quest becomes one of getting employed and to fit into a set groove rather than experimenting, learning and growing. So when one meets young founders like Gupta or Sai Pradyoth at My Copie (mycopie.com), one wonders what sets them apart. After all they and their ilk who become entrepreneurs represent less than 5% of a graduating batch.

The answer surprisingly lies in the support and faith of their families. They are most often from business families who understand that you need to fall and get up to learn to walk. They understand and support the ability to take risk. They understand that you have to like what you are doing.

Getting placed from campus is not the panacea to all problems. Families—and one is talking of small town business families—are willing to cut some slack and tell the child that he can tryout his dream for the next 2-3 years. If they do not succeed then they can go ahead and get into a regular job or join the family business. Education never goes to waste and what you learn in finance, marketing and people management in running your entrepreneurial venture teaches you more than a decade at any job.

Equally important is the role of the educational institute. An institute like IIT Delhi offers all engineering students with the choice to do humanities’ subjects like literature, psychology, logic as well as management. This sets the base for any student with dreams, to understand what is needed to meet his goals and makes for a well rounded personality. Perhaps this is the reason why the highest number of start- ups is by former students of this Institute. IIT Delhi students also have stellar role models of graduates who have gone to set up companies like Flipkart, CareerNet, etc.

If we have to move from the standard model of how to place students at jobs to how to help them create companies that generate jobs, then we need to take a few bold steps.

* We need to encourage entrepreneurs and increase the risk-taking capabilities of both graduating students and their parents. Failure need not be a negative, it is a great teacher.

* Let there be more incubation centres that provide seed capital and facilities to student groups to boot strap, experiment, understand the market and to breed teams with complementary skills.

* Mentors are needed to mould and encourage such student entrepreneurs, both professors and industry folks.

* Create role models and glorify these risk takers as much as the high earning placement record.

* Educate placement officers of institutes. They see 100% placement as the goal irrespective of whether the glove fits. It is no wonder that we have such a high attrition rate of young engineers and graduates who are often square pegs in a round hole.

Let the management of colleges pride themselves on how many new companies were set up by their graduating batch rather than how many of them got placed at multinational firms. We need both as a society and to move forward as a country.

Poornima Shenoy is founder and chief executive of Latitude Edutech, a young enterprise providing educational services to universities and enterprises.