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The Degree as India’s Social Passport
For decades, the university degree has occupied an unusually powerful place in India’s social imagination. It has represented education, status, upward mobility and, above all, the promise of employment. Families have often measured educational success not by what a young person can actually do, but by the degree he or she possesses. That model helped expand access to higher education and created opportunities for millions. But an uncomfortable question now demands attention: what happens when the labour market changes faster than the degree?
That question has acquired fresh urgency with NITI Aayog’s Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat@2047, published on August 18, 2026. The report argues for a fundamental redesign of the relationship between education, skilling and employment. India has formally skilled more than 7.67 crore individuals since 2014-15, while about ₹34,000 crore was allocated across key Central ministries for skilling-related expenditure in FY2025-26. Yet persistent weaknesses remain, including outdated curricula, inadequate practical exposure, uneven industry participation and weak connections between certification and employability.
Sanyal’s Provocation Deserves a Serious Hearing
Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, has recently placed the debate in sharper terms. He has questioned whether the conventional lecture-centric university model can remain unchanged when knowledge is widely available online and artificial intelligence can explain concepts, generate examples and answer questions almost instantly.
His suggestion that ambitious young people could begin working earlier while completing degrees alongside employment has understandably generated debate. But the important point is not whether every student should leave college and start working at 18. The deeper question is whether a system designed around the scarcity of teachers, books and specialised knowledge can continue to operate in the same manner when information itself is becoming abundant.
Sanyal’s wider criticism of prolonged preparation for highly competitive government examinations is connected to the same concern. When large numbers of talented young people spend several prime years pursuing a tiny number of prestigious positions, the issue is not simply examination difficulty. It is also about whether society has created sufficiently respected alternatives in entrepreneurship, industry, research, skilled professions and emerging sectors.
One Labour Market Cannot Have One Educational Route
India’s labour market makes such rethinking unavoidable. NITI Aayog places the labour force at about 65.4 crore people. Of these, 58.4% are self-employed, 21.7% are regular wage or salaried workers and 19.8% are casual labourers.
This is far too diverse an economy for one academic pathway to prepare everybody equally well. A commerce graduate entering retail, a technician moving into electric vehicles, a young entrepreneur starting a small enterprise, a manufacturing worker seeking higher productivity and an informal worker trying to improve earnings require different combinations of knowledge, technical competence and workplace exposure.
The problem, therefore, is not that India has too many degrees. It is that the degree is too often treated as a universal employment passport. A qualification may certify that a student has completed a prescribed course, but employers increasingly want evidence of communication, adaptability, problem-solving, digital competence, teamwork and the ability to apply knowledge in real situations.
Education and Skills Must Stop Living in Separate Worlds
The answer is not to create a false contest between education and skills. India needs both. A university education should offer intellectual depth, critical thinking and disciplinary knowledge, while also giving students meaningful opportunities to apply what they learn.
The NITI report is especially important here. It describes learning and delivery models as excessively theoretical and weakly connected to workplace requirements. It recommends stronger industry participation, work-integrated degrees, apprenticeship-embedded programmes, modular learning and earn-while-you-learn pathways.
The same principle should work in the opposite direction. Vocational education must not become an educational dead end. A student beginning in an ITI, apprenticeship or skills programme should be able to return to formal education later and progress towards a diploma or degree without discarding previously acquired learning.
The National Credit Framework Can Change the Equation
The National Credit Framework has the potential to make this flexibility real. NITI Aayog envisages credits earned through school education, higher education, short-term skilling and workplace learning being accumulated and carried forward rather than remaining trapped inside separate institutional systems.
This is particularly important in an economy where technologies, occupations and skill requirements may change several times during a person’s working life. Education can no longer be imagined as something completed by the age of 21 or 22 before “real work” begins. Learning, employment and reskilling will increasingly have to overlap.
Universities will remain indispensable, but their value must increasingly lie in what cannot be reduced to a recorded lecture or an AI-generated response: research, laboratories, close mentoring, intellectual debate, collaboration, field experience, ethical judgement and the creation of new knowledge.
From Credentials to Capability
India should also resist a simplistic “skills versus humanities” debate. Communication, writing, interpretation, historical understanding, creativity and ethical reasoning are themselves economic capabilities. As machines become better at routine technical and cognitive tasks, distinctly human capacities may become more valuable rather than less.
The social prestige attached to degrees will not disappear overnight, nor should public policy attempt to destroy it. Instead, alternative pathways must become equally respectable. Apprenticeships, vocational education, work-integrated degrees, entrepreneurship and modular credentials should no longer be seen as second choices for those who could not enter conventional college.
Viksit Bharat will require many more educated Indians. But education can no longer be measured simply by years spent in classrooms or certificates accumulated. The more useful question for every institution, employer and student is becoming increasingly clear: after completing this course, what can the learner understand, create, solve and do?
Prof. (Dr) Hitesh D. Raviya is Head, Department of English and Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda
These pieces are being published as they have been received – they have not been edited/fact-checked by ThePrint.
