The increasing menace of Unemployable Graduates - II (Education System)

90% of Graduates, 75% of Engineering Graduates and 77% of MBAs in India are unemployable.

The above figures are official and have been arrived through certain surveys. The question is that how have the officials arrived at these specific figures?

This is the average percentage of candidates that are rejected from the number of applicants. The final figure has been arrived after collating the facts and figures from various employers across the industry.

I would like to question this approach to arrive at such disheartening numbers. I had cited an incident from my personal experience in my last post, giving an insight about the recruitment & selection process followed in the industry for you to understand the shortcomings.

Through my questions I will discuss all the problems that actually looms over the future of our youth and in turn our country.

Should our school and colleges train the students for our industry over and above the basic education that they provide?

The outcomes of these surveys and researches directly question our education system. The statement that 90% of our Graduates are unemployable directly blames our colleges for not producing Graduates with requisite skills for employment.

I would rather blame the whole approach and mindset instead of the curriculum and way of imparting education of our colleges and educational institutes.

First of all our schools and colleges impart basic education to give a platform to students to launch their career ahead. When we say that 90% of our graduates are unemployable, are we not doing injustice when according to the current standards Bachelor’s Degree is considered to be the lowest basic education level. Does the industry itself consider the Bachelor’s Degree (other than Engineering Degree) for employment? When they already have rejected the Bachelor’s Degree level as unemployable, it’s injustice on their part to claim such mind boggling percentage of unemployable graduates. Till the 70’s matric or intermediate was considered enough for a job but the then Govt. conspired and upgraded the lowest education qualification to be a Bachelor’s Degree. This was done to delay the age at which a career takes off which would lessen the total employment period to save revenue. Now it has been upgraded even further. 

I admit that our education system has not evolved with the pace that our economy has evolved with. But haven’t we reached to the current level with the products of the same education system or would rather say a much lacklustre system than the present one.

Let me one by one point out the real shortcomings of our education system and in course even strike out the unjustified expectations that our Industry nurtures.

Branding of Education Institutes/Courses like sellable products – My father used to rightly say that “a child studies and not the school”. This used to be his statement when we were running after getting admitted in some renowned school or college. Philosophically he is right but practically not. I feel very sad about our so called educationists and reformists when they do not utter a word about brazen rankings of educational institutes published by some national magazines based on factors like courses offered, placement, salary offered, alumni, etc. There are students who are so brand obsessed that they spend some vital years of their life trying to compete through the entrance test as if that is their final aim in life. It is not the fault of the students, these entrance exams are projected in such a manner. Let us take a small case to understand how this spoils the future of our youth and country.

There are 3 different courses ranked according to the earning prospects:-

1. A
2. B
3. C

There are 5 different colleges offering course A ranked according to the placement and salaries offered with given number of seats

1. E -3
2. F-3
3. G-5
4. H-5
5. I-5

Total 21 seats for course A

Now, let us imagine that there are 100 students eligible for applying for these courses and colleges. According to the trend prevalent in India out of the 100 students 80 will apply for the course A. The other 20 will opt for the other courses B & C with 30 seats each.

Further out of the 80 students applying for course A, around 60 would be vying for the 6 seats offered by colleges E & F. Now you can imagine the situation after the entrance tests here.

• Out of 60 students vying for 6 seats, 54 will have to opt for the other options and what happens if many of these, out of over confidence or brand attraction have not bothered to apply for the other lower ranked colleges? I can bet this number will be as close to 50 out 54. They will take up some coaching class and attempt for the entrance next year and in some cases year after year.
• Now out of the total 80 students applying for course A, 59 will have to opt for other course altogether or again take up some coaching class and attempt for the entrance next year.
• Now for the courses like B & C, they have only 20 students applied for 60 seats offered. Maybe another 10 seats will be filled by the students who failed to get admitted in course A. Now to fill the rest 30 seats, the colleges offering courses B & C will lower their eligible criteria.

Now you can imagine the future of the 50 students who have directly being affected by the commercialisation of our education system and have laid foundation to their bleak future. They don’t understand that there will be another 150 students to compete with next year.  (According to CBSE, the number of students appearing for the class X examination is 8.65% more than last year. For the class XII examination, the increase in the number of candidates is 8.80%.)

I think I have made it clear that how does the commercialisation or the distorted way of projecting/advertising the educational institutes and courses dampens the future of our youth and our country. This actually inversely affects the juvenile mind of our youth.

The quality of faculty - Indian IT firms reject 90 percent of college graduates and 75 percent of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained, according to Nasscom. Why does this happen? Our curriculum is said to be the one of the best in the world, then where do we lack basically in imparting the knowledge to our students? Now, if curriculum is best and the students are brilliant then the link between them i.e. the teacher is weak. There was a time when Teaching was considered to be the one of the most respectable and coveted job in our country but the situation has totally reversed. Whom do we see as teachers these days?

• Housewives having some time to spare from their household chores.
• Failed aspirants of some highly regarded entrance exams like Civil Services, IIT-JEE, Bank POs etc. to name a few.
• People who are not left with any other option as career to choose from.
• There are even people who aspire to lead a relaxed life.

May be some people would not agree or feel hurt with my remarks, but it is harsh truth. We can actually count those people on fingers who have teaching as their first choice of career. Now the question is why has this happened and how can this be rectified? How can we attract quality people in teaching?

This was obvious from the results tabulated by E-convergence Technologies Limited (ETL), a private sector company with which this author is closely associated. During 2002-03, ETL decided to find out more about the quality of education being imparted in Mumbai’s schools.

In order to normalise the sample base, it focussed only on privately managed schools and English medium schools. The study covered 34 schools who gave ETL permission to conduct a quiz in English and Mathematics (some of the questions were as rudimentary as putting a set of numbers in the right order). A total of 16,500 students appeared for the quiz. It was found that 65% of the students failed in Mathematics, while 75% failed in English. Almost all the students were from Classes V and VI (10-11 year-old children). That this could happen with privately managed, English medium schools in one of India’s prime cities is a good indicator of how low standards have fallen.

Are you aware of the salaries that the teachers of some top coaching institutes are drawing? You may be astonished to know. Find out.

Methodology of Education - Barely eight months after leaving prestigious Delhi University with an undergraduate degree in commerce, Reena Dubey is back in the classroom, poring over a textbook on debt recovery and taking notes on India's banking industry.

"I studied economics, accounting, trade, corporate tax planning and industrial law for three years. But I was still clueless when I graduated," said Dubey, 22. "All my education was bookish and theoretical."

Hoping to secure an entry-level job as a credit card collection agent, Dubey recently enrolled in a skills-building course offered by a New Delhi's training academy for new graduates who want to work in India's booming banking and retail industries.

"India's job market has changed, but my degree has not equipped me for it," she said.

We all have felt this gap whenever we enter the corporate as new entrants or sometimes as soon as we enter the job market.

About 69 percent of unemployed Indians are educated but lack skills, according to the Confederation of Indian Industry. Only 6 percent of the workforce has a professional certification other than a degree, a figure the Labour Ministry says it hopes to boost to 12 percent within five years.

Do you think this can be achieved? Where does the problem lie? Can you think of a solution to this?

Our country reacts to trends and hence the proactive approach is absent. By the time we built a cage to confine the existing threat, it grows further or larger or a new one starts to bang the door.

We all are aware of the IT boom of late 90’s where the IT companies had no other choice but to hire mechanical and civil engineers or even simple graduates who could just start and shut down a computer, because very very few colleges were actually teaching computers at that time and computers was not the first hand choice of students even. There were a few private institutes like NIIT, Uptron, Aptech etc. which were trying to fill the void. Now the situation is such that these people are there sitting at the highest position in the IT industry and dictating terms. This is the bad effect of following the trends blindly.

I don’t know whether you agree to my opinion but I would like to ask a question to all who disagree with me.

If we produce the best IT minds in the world then which are the new inventions or any path breaking work in the field of IT or related industry by Indian IT companies?

I doubt if any of our so called IT Giants have a serious R&D cell?

Those people who question the skills of the students, are they themselves skilled enough?

Now coming on the question of the fact that our degrees don’t give us the requisite skills for employment, I think everyone would agree to the fact that we cannot change the course/curriculum at the drop of a hat. Then how do we bring in or incorporate the ingredients of the ever changing industry standards? The main problem is that our educational institutes just make our students aware of the basics and facts theoretically and think their job is done. The unawareness of the practical implication of the facts learnt is also a kind of illiteracy. Even our teachers are illiterate in this regard as their own practical knowledge about the subject is absent.

In all, there is major void or gap between our education system and industry. They come together only once when the industry has to hire and the college has to place its students and finally end up complaining about each other.

The Entrance Tests and the eligibility/cut offs - Recently we heard a few hues and cries when the cut offs reached to its ridiculed level of 100% for the commerce stream in one of the colleges in Delhi University this year. What are these for and why do we need it?

We do not have enough colleges to cater to the increasing number of students passing out of different schools across the country every passing year. This is the situation when this is merely 4-5% of our total population.

And talking about the level of the new colleges that are opening to cater to this increasing number I will just put forward a hard hitting fact that I came to know a few years back.

When you move ahead on NH24 in Gaziabad in NCR region, you can see innumerable technical colleges on both the sides of the road which have mushroomed in recent years. Closely looking, these have been started after closing down the small time manufacturing industries along that stretch by the same Industrialists.

Now, if we have so few quality educational institutes to serve our humongous population than we can never get rid of these ridiculous cut offs and status symbol entrance exams.

The different types of secondary education boards like CBSE, ICSE, State Boards etc. are also contributing to this confusion by producing differently competent/qualified students for the same level.

Getting through these entrances exams are such an uphill task that students start their coaching as early as 4 – 5 years before they are eligible to apply i.e. for JEE exam students class VIII students are being admitted in coaching institutes. This parallel education system of private coaching has become an industry worth of approximately 40,000 crores.

Would any of the IITs produce the same quality of products with the quality students that any of the new technical colleges are admitting?

I would like to give an example of a school run by our anti corruption crusader Mr. Anna Hazare at his village Ralegaon Siddhi where they admit only those students who have been ousted from others schools due to various reasons.

I would also like to mention the Super 30 started by Anand Kumar in Patna, Bihar which trains extremely poor students for IIT-JEE entrance.

A special mention for Chandrakant Singh who has started a Chatanya Gurukul Public School in a remote village of Bihar with a bright vision and a unique concept. Read here

Their efforts are laudable but the effect is negligible compared to the population that India boasts.