Excessive focus on university education is making Indian youth unemployed and unemployable

The Indian education system, and broadly the network of universities in this country, has long treated university education as the best way to guarantee career and economic success. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that parents regularly encourage their children to sign up for degrees from eminent and respectable universities that promise them lucrative work opportunities. Our society often associates academic qualifications and success with intelligence and status, and even Indian policymakers view this rising college enrollment as a sign that they are doing their jobs properly. While it is true that such higher education has certainly brought about a lot of benefits to Indian society, our country’s emphasis on university degrees has led to a situation where many educated people are both unemployed and unemployable.

The main problem lies in the fact that our country’s education system is heavily biased towards traditional academic degrees. About 75% to 85% of India’s post-secondary students go for higher education programs, whereas only about 15% to 25% opt for vocational and/or technical training courses. The numbers are quite different if we look at developed nations such as Germany and the United States. In Germany, about 70% of students regularly enrol for vocational training courses, and in the United States, about 50% of students do the same. The figures are higher for South Korea and Japan, and even France has a respectable number of students signing up for vocational courses.

Such a dearth of skilled workforce in India naturally has an impact on the job market. Employers frequently complain about the fact that they don’t have the right kind of skilled technicians in sufficient numbers who can work for them. The problem lies in the fact that although a lot of young people in India are educated, they don’t have job-ready skills that can be valuable for recruiting companies. This also indicates a serious problem within the educational system in India: the education system in the country is more focused on producing credentials than on producing employable skills.

In any country one can speak of, it is not just important to have a degree, but to have proper job readiness that can be of value to the industries within the nation. While a lot of students in India have a good amount of theoretical knowledge, they lack proper technical competence, practical experience, and workplace skills. Most employers find that the new recruits they hire require additional training before they can work towards the growth of the company. In other cases, graduates find out the hard way that the skills they already have are in little to no demand in the actual workplaces to which they apply. This often results in finding it difficult to get good employment opportunities, even if they have spent years trying to achieve the skills that they thought would make them job-ready. This is why it is crucial for the policymakers in India to transform the education system in a way that prioritizes vocational and technical training.