Home ›› 19 Apr 2023 ›› Asia Biz
Business is booming in India’s $117 billion education industry and new colleges are popping up at breakneck speed. Yet thousands of young Indians are finding themselves graduating with limited or no skills, undercutting the economy at a piv-otal moment of growth.
Desperate to get ahead, some of these young people are paying for two or three degrees in the hopes of finally landing a job. They are drawn to colleges popping up inside small apartment buildings or inside shops in marketplaces. Highways are lined with billboards for institutions promising job placements, reports NDTV.
It’s a strange paradox. India’s top institutes of technology and management have churned out global business chiefs like Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft Corp.’s Satya Nadella. But at the other end of the spectrum are thousands of small private colleges that don’t have regular classes, employ teachers with little training, use outdated curriculums, and offer no practical experience or job placements.
Around the world, students are increasingly pondering the returns on a degree versus the cost. Higher education has often sparked controversy globally, including in the US, where for-profit institutions have faced government investigations. Yet the complexities of education are acutely on show in India.
It has the world’s largest population by some estimates, and the government regularly highlights the benefits of having more young people than any other country. Yet half of all graduates in India are unemployable in the future due to prob-lems in the education system, according to a study by talent assessment firm Wheebox.
Many businesses say they struggle to hire because of the mixed quality of education. That’s kept unemployment stubbornly high at more than 7per cent even though India is the world’s fastest growing major economy. Education is also becoming an outsized problem for Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he attempts to draw foreign manufacturers and investors from China. PM Modi had vowed to create millions of jobs in his campaign speeches, and the issue is likely to be hotly debated in the run up to national elections in 2024.
“We do face a challenge in hiring as specific skill sets required for the industry are not currently easily available in the mar-ket,” said Yeshwinder Patial, director for human resources at MG Motor India.
The complexities of the country’s education boom are on show in cities like Bhopal, a bustling metropolis of about 2.6 mil-lion in central India. Massive billboards with private colleges promising young people degrees and jobs are ubiquitous. “Regular classes & better placements: need we say more,” says one such advertisement.
Promises like this are hard to resist for millions of young men and women dreaming of a better life in India’s dismal em-ployment landscape. Higher degrees, once accessible only to the wealthy, have a special cachet in India for young people from middle and low-income families. Students interviewed by Bloomberg cited a string of reasons for investing in more education, from attempting to boost their social status to improving their marriage prospects to applying for government jobs, which require degree certificates from applicants.
One Bhopal resident, 25-year-old Tanmay Mandal, paid $4,000 for his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering. He was con-vinced the degree was a pathway to a good job and a better lifestyle. He wasn’t deterred by the fees that were high for his family, which has a monthly income of only $420. Despite the cost, Mr Mandal says he ended up learning almost nothing about construction from teachers who appeared to have insufficient training themselves. He couldn’t answer technical questions at job interviews, and has been unemployed for the last three years.
