Interest in Money !!!!

Ask a group of student in any decent B-school in India about his preferred stream and you’ll get answers like “I am a hardcore Finance person”, “I have always been interested in Finance” or “Money and Finance excites me”. On the contrary if you start asking specifically about a field like Human Resources, the replies would make you feel as if there can’t be anything more drab, dreary or unchallenging than HR. Is it just a coincidence that Finance is the highest paid sector these days and HR the lowest among management streams in general.

Similar patterns can be seen in the undergraduate fields also where it appears as if every guy or girl in high school is excited by the engineering stream due to their “interest” in the engineering field. Every student these days is “fascinated” by technology because he or she “was always interested in engineering”. About a decade and a half back every student’s “child hood” dream was to become a doctor. Is it again just a coincidence that engineering offers higher money and better career prospects with much lower efforts as compared to medicine and before liberalization doctors were better off moneywise.

I am not saying that students are greedy and always after easy money. Infact they should always make the career decisions on the basis of future career prospects and market scenarios. But what disturbs me is their not openly accepting the fact that the career choice they have made is driven primarily by monetary factors and not due to some genetic interest in that field. Why can’t they say openly that the choice they have made might have been different had the economic scenario not been the same?
The market driven choices is not a phenomenon limited to higher education. I got the first taste of it when I was in the 8th standard and for the 9th and 10th standard we had to choose between two languages: Hindi and Sanskrit. Now in today’s world of globalization which student would want to learn Sanskrit, a pre historic Indian language with hardly any use anywhere in the world but not surprisingly almost every student wants to take it though only the top one fourth of them used to get selected due to limited number of seats. If you are not already aware of the reason behind this, it’s simply due to the higher scoring opportunity in a Sanskrit exam as the exam is more objective and hence a better score in class 10th.