The quality of our higher education, and resultant employability of young people, has been a topic of tempestuous discussions for several decades.
About 20 years back, IT industry body NASSCOM said that only 25% of engineering graduates were readily employable in the technology industry. While there were debates on the methodology adopted to arrive at this number, the findings set the tone for serious introspection among different stakeholders—the government, academia, industry, parents, students and trade bodies.
Cut to the present. A recent Wheebox India Skills Report, in collaboration with the Confederation of Indian Industry, the All India Council for Technical Education, the Association of Indian Universities and Pearson, reported that 50.3% of young people were employable, overall. Importantly, the percentage of employable women increased to 52.8%.
While the two reports aren’t directly comparable—as one is limited to engineering graduates and the technology sector and the other cuts across industries—the drift of the narrative cannot be missed. Importantly, on a massively expanded base, more and more young people are becoming employable, some readily, and some with appropriate interventions.
What has changed in the past 20 years to make such a large canvas of talent employable?
Seven significant developments have reshaped the educational and skilling landscape, enhancing the quality of talent and making India a powerhouse of global talent. These developments have resulted in excellence at scale, integration of skills with education, acceptance of online and hybrid learning, involved industry participation and interdisciplinary learning.
Excellence at scale
First, India boldly went beyond the affiliating system of universities to create hundreds of standalone universities and autonomous institutions. While the affiliating system of education drove ‘standardization at scale’, these autonomous institutions drove ‘excellence and innovation at scale’, thereby staking a claim to the exalted status enjoyed by just a handful of institutions such as the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), the National Institutes of Technology (NITs) and the All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS).
In other words, India moved from the Model-T of education to the Tesla model of education where refresh cycles to curriculum, pedagogy and assessment happen frequently and not over years.
Today, India has more than 400 private universities—including state private universities—and a majority of them were established in the last 10 years. Many of these institutions pride themselves in having high-quality faculty of international repute, multi-modal approaches to teaching and learning, contemporary syllabi and curricula, and strong industry-academia linkages.
Notably, a number of the new private universities are funded by corporate houses and industrialists, and some of them are the finest examples of collective philanthropy in India. While corporate funded institutions are not new, the sheer number and speed with which they have come up in the last few years is unprecedented. Universities such as Ashoka, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, O.P. Jindal, Flame, Krea, Mahindra, Jio, Lakshmi Mittal and Plaksha have reimagined higher education and set global benchmarks in a very short period.
Second is the establishment of more than 50 new IITs, IIMs, Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs), Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISERs) and NITs. Many of these newer institutions are mentored by the leadership from well-established and highly reputable institutions, thereby cross-pollinating best practices and nurturing them, gracefully.
Interestingly, there are 25 IIITs in India today, of which 21 were established in the last 10 years, largely in the public-private-partnership mode. Many of these institutions have been co-funded by reputable companies, and many of their leaders—including S. Ramadorai of TCS, B. Santhanam of St. Gobain and Arun Jain of Intellect Design—are chairmen of the board of governors. What’s particularly noteworthy is that these institutions have come up in tier II and tier III cities, including in the eight north-eastern states, driving higher levels of inclusion and equity.
Third is the expansion of well-established educational brands, including those with an ‘institution of eminence’ tag. Examples include the Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, which has expanded its footprint to Goa, Hyderabad and Mumbai, and the Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT) that has expanded to Chennai, Amravati and Bhopal. There are dozens of such well-run institutions that are ranked within the top 200 institutes that feature in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF). Launched in 2015, NIRF outlines a methodology to rank institutions across the country.
These institutes have expanded their footprint across India and added a staggering number of students to the national pool.
Many of these high-quality institutions have also produced an unimaginable number of nation builders and institution builders. Take for example BITS, Pilani. Its alumni base includes 7,500 founders of companies, 6,000 CEOs, 3,000 academicians and many change makers who have made a social impact on the world at large.
Hybrid learning
Fourth is the rapidly gaining acceptance of degrees, diplomas and other nano-credentials earned through online and hybrid modes. While technology drives online learning at scale, it also provides flexibility and choice. This makes for a perfect platform for re-imagination of both teaching and learning.
About two decades back, this writer had the good fortune of participating in a conference on higher education. Someone from the audience asked a vice chancellor on the panel on what he thought about degrees through distance education and open universities. Without batting an eyelid, he remarked, “Distance education is the best form of education. I will strongly recommend it to my neighbour’s son or daughter.”
Cheeky it may sound, but that was the reality then.
Today, online degrees and nano-credentials through hybrid programmes have gone mainstream. And, for a cross-section of learners, including those pursuing work-integrated learning, it is the most sought-after mode of learning. One stellar example is what’s happening at IIT Madras with its first online degree programme.
After 50 years after its founding, IIT Madras has about 11,000 students on-campus pursuing their undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral programs across disciplines of study. Interestingly, in less than three years of its launch, IIT Madras has more than 17,000 students registered for its online BS degree in data science and applications, giving an opportunity to learners, regardless of age, location or academic background, to earn formal credentials. Not surprisingly though, both a father and son are pursuing this programme!
Not just IIT Madras. Some of the best run universities are offering new-age online programmes with ready market acceptance. MBA in fintech by BITS, Pilani, MA in public policy by O.P. Jindal, BA in business administration (logistics) by Sastra and BBA (sports management) by D.Y. Patil are good examples. It is estimated that there are more than 500 University Grants Commission (UGC)-approved online graduate, postgraduate, diploma and certificate programmes offered by progressive universities in India.
Skilling with education
Fifth is the acceptance of skilling as an integral part of education. Embedding skill-based courses into the curricula, and giving them the credit equivalence for grant of degrees, has been a true game changer.
Three noteworthy initiatives made this possible—scaling of the National Skills Development Corporation (NSDC) and Skill Sector Councils (SSC) across industries; incubation of skilling universities such as the TeamLease Skills University and the Symbiosis Skills and Professional University, and availability of massive open online courses platforms such as the National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning (NPTEL).
All these entities curate and deliver world-class programmes on a number of foundational as well as job-oriented subjects. NPTEL, alone, has 4.5 million subscribers for its more than 3,000 courses. Increasingly, every university in the country is encouraging students to learn from the best faculty who anchor these courses on NPTEL.
Industry participation
Sixth is the increasing participation of the industry in all facets of academia, beyond the establishment of their own institutions. These include developing curriculum, curating new-age degree programmes, teaching courses as professors of practice, sponsoring applied research, creating internship and hackathons, and undertaking reverse sabbaticals.
For example, Tata Consultancy Services, along with leading academicians, has designed a four-year, AICTE-approved undergraduate programme titled ‘computer science and business systems’. This programme enables students to not only learn core and emerging topics in computer science but also develop an appreciation of humanities, management and human values, making them industry ready at the end of the programme. Over 60 engineering institutions across India offer this programme.
While this is a good example of an individual company making a big impact, recently, about a dozen global companies—including Google, Cognizant, Infosys, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Accenture and Cisco—joined hands with distinguished professors from the IITs, the IIITs and the NITs to rewire the curriculum of the undergraduate computer science programme offered by the thousands of AICTE recognized institutions across the country. Just this one initiative will significantly impact the learning needs of millions of students.
STEM to STEAM
Seventh is the growing recognition of the need for inter-disciplinary or interwoven learning.
For the past three decades, India has over-indexed on engineering and technology within STEM, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and math. But in the past few years, we have seen a shift to STEAM, with arts included in the acronym. There has also been a rekindling of interest in fundamental sciences—biology, math, physics and chemistry.
While the pandemic catalysed job opportunities for students of biosciences, math is increasingly seen as the new engineering. Math, along with statistics and computing, has become the foundation of analytics—including health analytics, climate analytics, risk and fraud analytics, people analytics, and sales analytics. This has resulted in massive, high-value job opportunities for students pursuing math and statistics. A case in point is the average salary for MSc graduates in data science at Chennai Mathematical Institute. It has gone up from ₹9 lakh to over ₹21 lakh in about three years, with the highest salary at over ₹45 lakh per annum.
With disruptive innovation happening at the intersection of disciplines, in the last few years, we have also seen a spectrum of dual majors and electives being offered for students to crossmatch, based on their areas of interest. Engineering and anthropology; economics and data science; mathematics and music; sociology and intellectual property are all par for the course. This inter-disciplinary learning is resulting in new-age skills at scale. They include problem finding and problem solving, critical thinking and analysis, creativity and originality, reasoning and ideation. These skills drive higher employability in new-age jobs.
While it’s still early days with the launch of the New Education Policy, we are seeing more multi-disciplinary universities shaping up, accentuating the much-needed left-brain-right-brain collaboration.
Looking forward
While there is no denying the fact that we still churn out colleges under the affiliating system of education—along with Pakistan and Bangladesh, the two other countries where this system is in vogue—and spew out students who are not readily employable, it’s important to recognize that India has come a long way, especially in the last 10 years.
The growth of micro, small and medium enterprises across industries, the global capability centers of Fortune 2000 companies, and startups is in part due to the explosion of this high-quality talent during this period.
It is also important to mention the role played by the 2% corporate social responsibility (CSR) mandate by the government in catalysing the participation of corporates in education. After all, education receives an outsized amount of the annual CSR spend, followed by healthcare and livelihood.
As a nation, we can brood over what’s not happening. Or we can look at the newer developments around us and find ways to accelerate them. Given the pace and scale of adoption of these seven trends, it wouldn’t be surprising if this new technology-enabled foundation results in exponential employability in the next five to ten years.
Ramkumar Ramamoorthy is former chairman and managing director of Cognizant India, and former pro vice chancellor of professional learning at Krea University.