Higher education in. India! Worthless degrees and jobless graduates.

Dr Prabhu Dev
5 min readOct 31, 2017

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Disconnected higher education.

Disconnected from the industry, dwarfed in quality, deprived of the skills, poor in content and low in deliverables , sums up the of the status of higher education in India.

Some education is better than no education -seems to be the policy.

There is Massification of higher education.By 2020the Indian government aims to achieve 30% gross enrolment, which will mean providing 40 million university places, an increase of 14 million in six years. India is fast turning into a nation of qualified unemployable unskilled, graduates.

Unemployment in 2011 was 10 million.

Unemployment in 2017 is 17.7 million

And the fact that half of the population is below the age of 25 and will soon enter the job market will only make matters worse.

The degree to which society can provide employment to those who seek employment is one of the most important indicators of the well-being of any society.

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Worthless degrees and jobless graduates.

93% of MBAs are not employable. Parents spend lakhs of rupees to get their children. an MBA. Of the 5% who get a job are in non skilled sector and earn anywhere between Rs8000 to 10000 a month.there are about 5500 B schools.75% of the engineers are unemployed and majority of the rest are doing non engineering jobs.

employers, still find today’s college graduates severely lacking in some basic skills, particularly problem solving, decision making, and the ability to prioritize task

One third of India’s population is below 15 years of age, 20 per cent of the population in the 15–24 age groups and More than 500 million Indians are younger than 25 years.

Only One out of every seven children born in India goes to college.

And what is even more alarming is that in our schooling system. By the time the children come into Class XI, only 27% of our students are able to stay on which means 73% dropout i.e. 21 million children every year are out of the school system.

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India has the second largest higher education system in the world. Although the Indian higher education has already entered a stage of massification, the Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education remains low at 23.6 percent. as on 2014–15.

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68 percent of the universities and 91 percent of the colleges are rated average or below average in terms of the quality parameters specified by the NAAC. There is no progress or there is slow progress in the renewal of higher education curriculum to align it more closely with the skills demanded in a diversified economy; and inadequate funding for research

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Poor quality of education resulting in unsatisfactory learning outcomes is a matter of great concern. the lack of trained educators and ineffective pedagogy remain a major challenge.

The low quality of teaching and learning is a major issue.

Constraints on research and innovation adds to poor quality.

There is a serious disconnect between the existing school and higher education curricula and the curricular thrusts that are needed for promoting the acquisition by students of relevant skills required for decent work and a better life in a rapidly changing world.

the institutional arrangements to support technical and vocational education programs remain highly inadequate. A large proportion of the products of the education system are found to lack employable skills. This has substantially lowered the credibility of the higher education system. The utility of higher education in assuring employment remains questionable. Many graduate and post-graduate students do not get jobs in their respective fields.

serious gaps in teacher motivation and training resulting in deficiencies relating to teacher quality and performance is a major challenge.

Read and mug up “

Our education system basically promotes rat race among our children. They have to read and mug-up entire text book without understanding it.

a student who scores 90 out of 100 and comes first actually remains a rat , may be the first one. I mean to say he or she does not have any analytical skills that a child must have.

The whole assessment system needs to be revamped to ensure comprehensive assessment of the students, including learning outcomes relating to both scholastic and co-scholastic domains

Childs persona vs academic qualification.

Children with disabilities and children with special needs constitute a significant proportion of out-of-school children. This situation highlights the needs to equip schools to address the challenging needs of children with disabilities who are both socially and educationally The whole assessment system needs to be revamped

our education system is not helping to develop persona of a child. it is personality that. requires to be built along with the academic qualification. Mere qualification without the personality does not add to much.

our education and examination system is designed to demand good numbers from a child. and not his personality. Hence a child is not well exposed to world. There is no scope to develop all round personality.

Absence of critical analytical thinking.

Four children are not able to do critical analysis of anything, for example our history, culture and religion. They take the line of establishment or the views of predominant majority.

They are simply not able to look things from their own perspective. If you want a society should become a lot better than we must develop a culture of looking at things critically. It will establish a status quo society.

We are simply failing at this because of our education system. Children must learn to have an independent perspective and not merely toe the line of establishment.

One should be taught to criticize and analyze and understand the narrative.

Global outlook.

The educational activities and learning process are no longer confined to the classroom and, therefore, the domain of education is no longer limited to formal schooling or higher education.

Universal outlook is missing. The world is a small village in the days information technology, the inter net, the web world ,face book and other social media. The knowledge is doubling every two yrs. what you learn. today is obsolete in a year or two.

There has been only a limited initiative for upgrading the skills of existing faculty; build synergies between teaching and research to promote excellence in both;

To make things worse, our teachers themselves are not sufficiently trained to teach kids. They do not have proper training that how they are going to impart values in children that are going to change the future of the country.

If they can teach properly then the government does not have enough salary to pay. Hence, to improve our education system teachers should be better trained and more importantly better paid.

It is simply because skills that are required in a job market are not present in a fresh graduate. All that a student is taught in his entire school and college life is almost redundant for job markets.

Skill that is required by them is not taught in schools and colleges. Hence our education system is needed to be revamped and must be designed according to our economic policies.

Now, in college campuses it has become a common thing that every young student is interested in a getting a job that pays them well. However, they would never like to become an entrepreneur.

This lack of ambition does not allow our country to excel in any field. This attitude of our children making them slaves of few multinational companies.

This is also a big problem that needs to be addressed. We are not able to decide on the medium of language of our education system.

Sent from my iPad

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Dr Prabhu Dev

Former director of Sri Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology, Former VC of Bangalore University and former chairman of the Karnataka State Health Commission