Higher education must employ fresh grads

Simple question: Who was responsible for what happened with the youths barging into parliament on December 13? Answer: the Modi government. Why? For having brought common young graduate Indians to their knees. Prima facie, those youngsters weren’t fifth columnists, or upstart politicians. They only sought to air their indignation, and it displayed unequivocal roiling among young educated Indians.

Much of the commentariat conversed on the frightening unemployment besetting young Indians, but few steered the conversation on another relevant axis: Education.

The parliament invaders were annoyed with the current jobs scene and precarity that subsumes being semi-employed, under-employed, unemployed and/or obtaining work that doesn’t align with their requisite qualifications. When one sets their intransigence in the backdrop of Modi’s constant pronouncements on India’s prowess and growth prospects that are to come about via skills education, digital education, etc., one can empathise with their ire even more. These overtures now look like a fraud perpetrated on young India, of whom at least a set most likely voted for Modi in the last two general elections. Their statement in parliament was: Where is our future; what about my job? On these counts, Modi has messed up India, and is doing worse than his predecessor who looked enervated in his last three years as PM. But now, that time appears as if ‘Singh was King’. An allied question over youth unemployment must reckon with education.

Education ought to be an election issue. India will fare even worse than it already is doing, if school and college education do not become political issues, the way water, roads, and power are. This is a great gambit for the Opposition, if they are willing to pitch it as an electoral idea and sculpt an attractive employment generation programme.

One hears so much about youth ‘skilling’, entrepreneurship, encouragement to build start-ups, and new kinds of technical courses promising students future glories. How are these faring at the moment? Is there an employment boom for fresh engineers, data scientists et al?

This is dismaying from the average graduate’s viewpoint. How come there are so many technical education institutes and colleges but little meaningful employment for young and recent graduates? We need wide political action and discussion on the asymmetries between education and employability and concrete, workable solutions to them. The Ministry of Education and its overseeing institutions (AICTE, UGC) are accountable for this disarray. That said, what are we to quickly do with the large numbers of improperly employed educated young Indians?

One small way out is through policymaking that galvanises them into teaching or related areas in education. Can we train each graduate or postgraduate to work in the education realm, at a basic level with decent pay, while drastically improving the lot of educators? The university, the college, maybe even the school systems have to think of our unemployed young graduates as a creative bellwether to engender employment and usher in fresh blood, easing the load on a strapped, overworked teaching and academic community at several echelons of education.

Can educational leadership elicit ideas for this? Like, higher education institutions quickly remoulding some of their courses to help equip young Indian graduates to gain some form of employment in the education sector, be it the university, the college, the polytechnic, or even at the school level? One, there is a shortage of staff, and two, this will be valuable experience for these individuals.

In universities in the West, young graduates often ‘shadow’ their academic advisers; it happens here, too. We need to set the climate so that out-of-work youth become contributors to our education system.