The segment about the Indian Institutes of Technology will re-air
on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, June 22nd. It is slated to be the
second segment in the program.
CBS News 60 Minutes To Rebroadcast The Segment on IITs on June 22
The segment about the Indian Institutes of Technology will re-air
on "60 Minutes" this Sunday, June 22nd. It is slated to be the
second segment in the program.
Lizzie Weinreb, Associate Producer, "60 Minutes", CBS News
"the smartest, most successful, most
influential Indians who've migrated to the US seem to share a common credential:
They're graduates of the Indian Institute of Technology, better known as
IIT. Made up of seven campuses throughout India, IIT may be the most
important university you've never heard of ... This is IIT Bombay. Put
Harvard, MIT and Princeton together, and you begin to get an idea of the status
of this school in India ... With a population of over a billion people in India,
competition to get into the IIT is ferocious. Last year, 178,000 high
school seniors took the entrance exam called the JEE. Just over 3,500 were
accepted or less than 2 percent. Compare that with Harvard, say, which accepts
about 10 percent of its applicants ... impact of IIT graduates has
been on the American technology revolution ... "I can't imagine a major area
where Indian IIT engineers haven't played a leading role "... It isn't
just high tech ... Fortune 500 headhunters are always on the lookout for that
IIT degree ... And the American companies love the kids from IIT ... Nehru,
India's first prime minister, created IIT 50 years ago just after independence
to train the scientists and engineers he knew the nation would need to move from
medieval to modern. He never imagined India would be supplying brainpower
to the whole world ..."
(CBS) Hi Everyone:
Thanks for watching! 
... I remember telling you in
November that I had just returned from Bombay, India. So this story has taken
two months. It's about a university that may be the hardest school in the world
to get into. It's called IIT- Indian Institute of Technology. A stunning
percentage of CEOs and innovators in the American high tech industry were
graduated from IIT. The government of India highly subsidizes the school and the
students who go there - it costs a kid just $700 a year. But - and here's the
rub - a full two-thirds of the students leave India for jobs (many of the best
come here) and never return. I think you'll find the story fascinating.