The existential threat of artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally broken the traditional promise of higher education: get a degree, get a job. The corporate hierarchy is aggressively shifting from a pyramid to a diamond.
At the bottom, where legions of fresh graduates used to find entry-level jobs, companies can now dispense with human employees, deploying AI to automate tasks. The roles at the centre and top demand high-level synthesis, creativity and adaptability.
With fewer entry-level positions available, an uncomfortable question haunts every student and parent in India while choosing a college: Why go to a certain university if it no longer guarantees a job?
The answer requires tearing down the way we view higher education. The university can no longer be seen merely through the lens of immediate employment. It must become the student’s ultimate sandbox—a place of radical self-discovery, intellectual friction and exploration.
Consider a young Indian’s journey. Where do they get the chance to figure out who they actually are and what they are good at? They cannot do it in our schools. The fundamental purpose of the school system is to establish a universal foundation—it must educate tens of millions of children to reach a baseline of literacy, numeracy, core subject knowledge and civic readiness. The sheer scale of the system makes it rigid; it cannot be a laboratory.
They certainly cannot figure it out when they enter the workforce. By the time a young adult secures a job, the stakes are far too high. They have bills to pay, ageing parents to support and eventually, families of their own. The financial and social risks of dropping everything to pivot careers or try something entirely new are paralysing.
That leaves a vital three-to-four-year window: the university.
This is that rare time in a person’s life when they have the intellectual freedom, the resources and the safety net to explore alternatives without ruinous consequences. A student must be allowed to mix disciplines, fail at new ventures and aggressively experiment to find their calling.
In an age where AI makes tomorrow entirely unpredictable, the only defence we can give our youth is agility. We must teach them survival skills. We must teach them to think like entrepreneurs—not necessarily to build startups, but to navigate ambiguity.
Currently, universities are failing at this because they are trapped in a metric-chasing rat race. They evaluate their worth by counting enrolled students, faculty ratios, publications, memoranda of understanding and patents filed.
But as Goodhart’s law warns us, when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Institutions game the system for rankings rather than focusing on the student’s intellectual evolution.
This institutional rigidity is downstream of a culture that has historically punished risk-takers. When Dr Subhas Mukhopadhyay created India’s first (and the world’s second) in vitro fertilization (IVF) baby in 1978—just 67 days after the world’s first in the UK—he was not celebrated as a pioneer. Instead, he was subjected to a brutal government inquiry that drove him to suicide.
Today, ironically, India is the second-largest IVF destination in the world. We can no longer afford to crush the experimental spirit. We must actively nurture it on Indian campuses.
What does this sandbox look like in practice? It means stripping away a rigid and predictable syllabus so that students can finally chase what actually interests them, testing wild ideas alongside a community of equally obsessed peers.
The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has already laid down a blueprint. Concepts like the Academic Bank of Credits are designed precisely for this—to let a student take a Python coding class here, a behavioural psychology seminar there, and build a unique as well as agile profile that AI cannot easily replicate. But execution remains patchy. Universities are deeply territorial, hesitant to accept credits earned elsewhere or allow genuine cross-disciplinary freedom.
This institutional paralysis must end. The challenges of the AI era do not respect departmental boundaries; an engineer today must understand ethics just as an economist must understand data science.
We need role-model universities that boldly dismantle these traditional silos and experiment with entirely new problem-driven pedagogies.
For this to happen, the regulatory ecosystem must evolve. Government bodies like the University Grants Commission (UGC) and All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) must act as facilitators of this revolution, not its gatekeepers. They must shift their mandate from enforcing rigid compliance to actively rewarding institutions that dare to innovate.
The era of mass-producing identical graduates for a predictable job market is dead. We are marching millions of young people into a diamond-shaped economy armed with pyramid-era tools. In an age when AI can instantly replicate standardized skills, a static degree is no longer a shield.
Indian universities face a stark and unavoidable choice: tear down their walls and become the dynamic and interdisciplinary sandboxes our youth desperately need to survive, or remain assembly lines, producing a workforce that may no longer be needed in a future rewritten by AI.
The author is director, School of Technology, Dhirubhai Ambani University, Gandhinagar.