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IITs better than US institutes, says CBS CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA TIMES NEWS NETWORK[ SATURDAY, JANUARY 18, 2003 12:18:10 AM ] SAN JOSE, California: As hundreds of IIT alumni gather here in Silicon Valley this weekend to mark the golden jubilee of their celebrated school, they have just heard of a fancy new equation being bandied around in the US: IIT=Harvard+MIT+Princeton. The encomium comes from CBS' highly-regarded 60 Minutes, the most widely watched news programme in the US, which in a rah-rah story last Sunday told its more than 10 million viewers that "IIT may be the most important university you've never heard of." "The United States imports oil from Saudi Arabia, cars from Japan, TVs from Korea and whiskey from Scotland. So what do we import from India? We import people, really smart people," co-host Leslie Stahl began while introducing the segment on IIT. "As you are about to see, the smartest, the most successful, most influential Indians who've migrated to the US seem to share a common credential: They are graduates of the IIT," Stahl reported. "Put Harvard, MIT, and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status of this school in India." The heady praise came just ahead of the IIT50 fete which begins this Friday with a keynote address by Bill Gates. Others attendees, besides the usual movers and shakers among the alumni, include Stanford University President John Hennessy, India's Human Resources Minister Murli Manohar Joshi, and US envoy to India Robert Blackwill. The IIT alumni are meeting in Silicon Valley because IITians are found in the greatest concentration here in the US, one reason why CBS chose to profile the school. The 60 Minutes segment was aired on the West Coast last Sunday, but it was displaced by an extended football game on the East Coast where it will be broadcast in the coming weeks. 60 Minutes typically spends several weeks and months, and several tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of dollars on a story. The IIT segment, which had been in the works since middle of last year, took co-host Stahl to the institute campus in Mumbai where she interviews current students and captures the ambience of the relatively modest school. The IITs don't offer well-rounded education, Stahl reports, "But in science and technology, IIT undergraduates leave their American counterparts in the dust." Among those interviewed for the story is IIT Delhi alumnus and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla, who tells her "When I finished IIT Delhi and went to Carnegie Mellon for my master's, I thought I was cruising all the way because it was so easy relative to the education I had got at IIT." But the moment of supreme irony comes when she interviews Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy and asks him about his son's education. Murthy: Well, my son, he wanted-probably wanted to do computer science at IIT. To do that, you have to be in the top 200 and he couldn't do that, so he went to Cornell instead. Stahl: (awed voiceover amid footage of IIT students on campus): Think about that for a minute. A kid from India using an Ivy League university as a safety school. That's how smart these guys are. Murthy: I do know cases where students who couldn't get into computer science at IIT, they have gotten scholarships at MIT, at Princeton, at Caltech
