The New York Times
A College Education Without Job Prospects
By ANAND GIRIDHARADAS Published: November 30, 2006
MUMBAI, India, Nov. 29 — The job market for Indian college graduates is split sharply in two. With a robust handshake, a placeless accent and a confident walk, you can get a $300-a-month job with Citibank or Microsoft. With a limp handshake and a thick accent, you might peddle credit cards door to door for $2 a day.
India was once divided chiefly by caste. Today, new criteria are creating a different divide: skills. Those with marketable skills are sought by a new economy of call centers and software houses; those without are ensnared in old, drudgelike jobs.
Unlike birthright, which determines caste, the skills in question are teachable: the ability to communicate crisply in clear English, to work with teams and deliver presentations, to use search engines like Google, to tear apart theories rather than memorize them.
But the chance to learn such skills is still a prerogative reserved, for the most part, for the modern equivalent of India's upper castes — the few thousand students who graduate each year from academies like the Indian Institutes of Management and the Indian Institutes of Technology. Their alumni, mostly engineers, walk the hallways of Wall Street and Silicon Valley and are stewards for some of the largest companies.
In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in India's 18,000 colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obedience and light on useful job skills.
Students, executives and educators say this two-tier education system is locking millions of people into the bottom berths of the economy, depriving the country of talent and students of the chance to improve their lot. For those who succeed, what counts is the right skills.
"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, a trade body that represents many leading employers. "The same person from the same institution with the same grades, but not having these skills, will either not get employed at all or will probably get a job in a shop or something."
India is that rare country where it seems to get harder to find a job the more educated you are. In the 2001 census, college graduates had higher unemployment — 17 percent — than middle or high school graduates.
But as graduates complain about a lack of jobs, companies across India see a lack of skilled applicants. The contradiction is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of undergraduate education. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to turn out degree holders whom no one wants to hire.
A study published by the software trade group last year concluded that only 10 percent of graduates with nonspecialized degrees were considered employable by leading companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, which advises the Indian government on overhauling the education system, said, "The real crisis for me is the place where 70 percent of your graduates are students who do basic science, bachelor of arts and bachelor of commerce."
Bijal Vora, a commerce student at Hinduja College here in Mumbai, formerly Bombay, would welcome a redesign of the system. "We have not done this to become salespeople," she said.
Hinduja is in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, little-known school, and so it exemplifies a middling college experience — neither the best nor the worst.
Between lectures there, dozens of students swarmed around a reporter to complain about their education.
"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," a commerce student, Sohail Kutchi, said.
Kinjal Bhuptani, a final-year student who expects next year to make $2 to $4 a day hawking credit cards, was dejected. "The opportunities we get at this stage are sad," she said. "We might as well not have studied."
The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as the essential job skills evolve from pushing papers to answering phones to making presentations. They said their courses offered few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this supposedly English-language college, the professors often used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.
Across India, half of graduates are not taught in English, effectively barring them from the high-end labor market, said Mohandas Pai, director of human resources at Infosys, a leading outsourcing company. And where English is taught, it is not necessarily the kind employers need.
"Depreciation nikal diya, assets ko less ho gaya." So went a lesson being given by the accounting professor at Dahanukar College in suburban Mumbai — removing depreciation reduces assets — an example of the widespread use in supposedly English-language colleges of Hinglish, an amalgam of Hindi and English.
A lack of communications skills may be the most obvious shortcoming, but it is not the only one. A deeper problem, specialists say, is a classroom environment that treats students like children even if they are in their mid-20's. Teaching emphasizes silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis and debate.
"Out! Out! Close the door! Close the door!" a management professor barked at a student who entered his classroom at Hinduja two minutes late. Soon after his departure, the door cracked open again, and the student asked if he could at least take his bag.
The reply: "Out! Out! Who said you could stand here?" A second student, caught whispering, was asked to stand up and cease taking notes.
Then there is the matter of teaching style. At Hinduja and Dahanukar, the mode of instruction at times evokes a re-education camp of some sort. In a marketing class at Hinduja, the professor paced in front, then pressed her chalk to the board.
She drew a tree diagram dividing it into indirect and direct marketing, then divided those into components, and those further into subcomponents. As students frantically took notes, she kept going, and before long she was teaching them that each region of Mumbai would have its own marketing representative: eastern Mumbai, western Mumbai, central Mumbai. There was no discussion, and there was little to discuss.
The professor then led the students in a chant: "What is span of management?"
"Span of management is the number of subordinates a supervisor will manage." She chanted the refrain four times.
Rote memorization is rife at Indian colleges because students continue to be judged almost solely by exam results. There is scant incentive to widen their horizons — to read books, found clubs or stage plays.
That is not good news for Indian companies, which are hiring these days. Infosys will take on 25,000 people this year from a pool of 1.5 million applicants. The ranks of the rejected are likely to include smart graduates who lack qualities like poise, articulateness and global exposure, Mr. Pai of Infosys said.
And even if rigid teaching ways are changed, experts say the rigidity of Indian households will continue.
"When we are raising our children," said Sam Pitroda, a Chicago-based entrepreneur who is chairman of the Knowledge Commission and was an adviser to Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in the 1980s, "we constantly tell them: 'Don't do this, don't do that. Stand here, stand there.' It creates a feeling that if there is a boundary, you don't cross it. You create boxes around people when we need people thinking outside the box."
-- My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of the same poverty. - Jorge Louis Borges