RAJAN J.

NANDOLA

THAKUR COLLEGE OF SCIENCE AND COMMERCE, KANDIVLI (E), MUMBAI

SHITAL A. VAKILNA

BAL BHARATI’S MAGHANMAL J. PANCHOLIA COLLEGE OF COMMERCE, KANDIVLI

(W), MUMBAI

“HIGHER EDUCATION AND EMPLOYABILITY” – THE CURRENT

INDIAN SCENARIO

ABSTRACT

India's higher education system is the third largest in the world, after China and the United
States. Every year, India is producing lakhs of graduates in various disciplines. India Inc is now
confronted with a severe crunch of ‘quality’ manpower as the undergraduates in the general
stream of Arts, Commerce and Science being turned out by the country’s educational
institutions are just not up to the mark. Only three out of ten respondents say that they are
completely satisfied with the new undergraduates that they have hired in the last 12 months. It is
projected by the 2020 India will have maximum number of people in age group of working
population thereby making it a superpower. But the question what will be the quality of such a
workforce? The best that can realistically be achieved may be for higher education to facilitate
the development in students of the understandings, skills and attributes that will help them to
make a success of their careers. There comes a point in students’ lives when they have to make a
step-change: higher education can take them so far, but then they have to deal with the
challenges that employment throws up.
PREAMBLE
India's higher education system is the third largest in the world, after China and the
United States. Every year, India is producing lakhs of graduates in various
disciplines. But according to a widely quoted study by McKinsey, only 25% of
engineering graduates and 10% of general graduates were considered employable
by multinational companies. This data reflects the poor standards of higher
education in our country. Several issues have figured in the discussion on higher
education in India but among those, issues relating to Access, Equity, Quality &
Employability are the most important which have prominently figured in the
current discussions.

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

India has recently witnessed a big boom in the manufacturing &service sectors
whereas other major economies are facing severe lay-offs in the labour market. In
order to sustain this trend, and to ensure that India does not throw away this key
advantage, it is imperative that we continue to produce a critical mass of highly
skilled manpower at an accelerated pace. The present study aims at bringing out
the current state of higher education & employability in India in limelight. It is
projected by the 2020 India will have maximum number of people in age group of
working population thereby making it a superpower. But the question what will be
the quality of such a workforce?

Research Methodology
Data collection: To achieve the objectives, the secondary sources of data are
used. A secondary source of data includes the usage of Magazines and Journals
and Newspapers related to Economic happenings and current.

SCOPE OF THE STUDY

According to the HRD Ministry statistics, India has about 480 universities and
about 22,000 colleges. Except for the IITs, IIMs and a few other institutions, which
put together will not exceed 50, can be included in the list of quality-institutions.
However, India figures nowhere in the list of top Universities in the world. Despite
60 years of independence, the country is unable to produce enough number of
graduates who are employable. The Human Resource Development Ministry is
busy hard-selling its reforms, especially the Foreign Universities Bill. On several
occasions in the last one month, the HRD Minister Kapil Sibal said India would
need more universities and colleges to increase the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER)
from the present 12 per cent to 30 per cent by 2020.

Mr. Sibal is just doing what his predecessors did in the past. The number of
Universities in India increased from 20 in 1947 to 480 in 2010 indicating a
nineteen-fold increase. Similarly, the number of colleges have increased
from 500 in 1947 to 22,000 in 2010, more than twenty-fold increase. But
even today, less than 25 per cent of students from all these institutions are
employable.

The foreign institutions will certainly bring quality education along with them,
but what will the government do to improve the quality of existing
institutions? Merely increasing the numbers will only lead to further
deterioration of quality. Further, the increase in number of colleges and
seats would decrease the enrollment ratio in existing institutions. For
instance, private engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh are not getting
enough students.

This year the government approved 70 new colleges, increasing the

number of engineering colleges in the state to 645. However, only top 10 top
engineering colleges were able to fill the seats in the management quota.
Once the foreign institutions come, this gap would increase further.

HIGHER EDUCATION & EMPLOYABILITY –THE

CURRENT INDIAN SCENARIO
24-year-old Jyoti, a resident of Warangal town, is doing her masters in economics
from Kakatiya University. She wants to join a multinational company after her
studies. But she doubts whether the company would hire her because she can't
speak a single sentence of English.

Similar is the case with Khwaja, a science graduate from Mahabubnagar

district of Andhra Pradesh. Having failed to get a proper job, he is presently
working as a salesman in a shopping mall in Hyderabad. The reason -- lack
of communication skills, especially in English.

The above cases represent the true picture of Indian economy where we often find
manpower which is highly educated but not employable. ‘Employability’ refers to
a graduate’s achievements and his/her potential to obtain a ‘graduate job’, and
should not be confused with the actual acquisition of a ‘graduate job’ (which is
subject to influences in the environment, a major influence being the state of the
economy). Employability derives from complex learning, and is a concept of wider
range than those of ‘core’ and ‘key’ skills. The ‘transferability’ of skills is often
too easily assumed.

India Inc is now confronted with a severe crunch of ‘quality’ manpower as the
undergraduates in the general stream of Arts, Commerce and Science being turned
out by the country’s educational institutions are just not up to the mark. Only three
out of ten respondents say that they are completely satisfied with the new
undergraduates that they have hired in the last 12 months. A FICCI-CVoter
Survey on the Employability Quotient of the Under graduates in India reveals this
unsettling reality that GenNext is woefully short of soft skills and vocational
training to take on the responsibilities of corporate sector management.

The survey notes that the new undergraduates fall short of the expectations of the
employers with regard to reliability, integrity, self motivation amongst employees,
self discipline, empathy for other workers and management, willingness to learn,
good written communication and basic computer skills.

The FICCI-CVoter Survey reveals that while 90 per cent of the respondents
believe that self- discipline is a strong attribute that employees must possess.
However, only 60 per cent of them believe that their present employees are self
disciplined. Only 50 per cent of the respondents to the survey feel that their
present crop of employees are self motivated, an attribute that 90 per cent of them
consider important at the workplace
The employability of graduates has become an aim that governments around the
world have, to varying extents, imposed on national higher education systems. This
interest in employability reflects an acceptance of human capital theory (Becker,
1975). Under human capital theory, the task of government is to foster conditions
that encourage growth in the stock of human capital, since this is seen as vital to
the performance of knowledge-based economies in a globalised society.
“Human capital directly increases productivity by raising the productive
potential of employees. [. . .] Improving skills and human capital is important in
promoting growth, both as an input to production and by aiding technological
progress. This has been recognised both in endogenous growth theory and also
in empirical studies comparing growth in different countries”. (HM Treasury,
2000, pp.26, 32).

The best that can realistically be achieved may be for higher education to facilitate
the development in students of the understandings, skills and attributes that will
help them to make a success of their careers. There comes a point in students’ lives
when they have to make a step-change: higher education can take them so far, but
then they have to deal with the challenges that employment throws up. There will,
in most cases, be a discrepancy between what employers would ideally like (a
graduate perfectly attuned to their needs) and what higher education can
reasonably supply (a graduate prepared, in both senses of the word, to learn what
the employer wants, and to perform accordingly). The employer has to expect that
the graduate will need to be inducted into the particular organisational culture and
given the support to succeed. Higher education institutions must recognise that for
many students the transition from education into employment is not a
straightforward matter and in the past many students have been ill-equipped for
this transition. During the 1990s, this issue has been exacerbated because of the
considerable expansion in graduate numbers which has taken place within a
relatively short period of time. Furthermore, the nature of graduate employment is
changing; today it is only a minority of students who can hold any realistic
expectation of employment in a position directly related to the discipline studied;
this is particularly the case for those students whose focus remains within
traditional academic disciplines. This debate did not centre on the necessity or
desirability of developing the students' employability skills but rather concentrated
on the development of practical mechanisms through which this decision might be
operationalised within the more general University constraints of financial restraint
for the benefit of the entire student population. It was essential that a means to
embed (and preferably also recognise and celebrate) skills be created which did not
totally take over the basic educational objectives which continue to be discipline /
field of study based.

Key elements of the debate divided into two broad categories.

• Which skills should be highlighted?
• How might the University recognise a meaningful skills progression?
• How might the University ensure that each (and every) student is fully
exposed to each skill area? Should skills be assessed separately from the
general curriculum?
• How should the skills be assessed?

An enabling academic and economic setting is a key factor determining the fate
of our nation in the wake of the knowledge sector boom. Higher education’s key
contribution to national prosperity lies in development of graduates with such
achievement at their disposal. This means that undergraduate programmes should
be concerned with four areas in particular:
• abstraction (theorising and/or relating empirical data to theory, and/or using
formulae, equations, models and metaphors);
• system thinking (seeing the part in the context of the wider whole);
• experimentation (intuitively or analytically); and
• collaboration (involving communication and team-working skills).

Within Higher Education the generic skills needed to enhance graduate

employability (whether defined in terms of immediate work-readiness or longer-
term career prospects) are now typically seen as including the skills emphasised by
Dearing and also Literacy, Problem-solving skills and Team-working skills. In
addition, the employability skills agenda is commonly defined to include
‘Understanding of the world of work’ which typically refers to knowledge about
the ways in which organisations work, what their objectives are and how people in
those organisations do their jobs (Coopers and Lybrand, 1998). University
responses to this agenda typically include modifications to existing course content
(sometimes in response to employer suggestions), the introduction of new courses
and teaching methods and expanded provision of opportunities for work
experience – all intended to enhance the development of employability skills
and/or ensure that the acquisition of such skills is made more explicit. In some
cases university departments have sought to ‘embed’ the desired skills within
courses; in other departments students are offered ‘stand-alone’ skills courses
which are effectively ‘bolted on’ to traditional academic programmes . In fact
many university departments now use a mix of embedded and stand-alone teaching
methods in their efforts to develop employability skills.

Aspiring Minds has conducted India’s first employability study of technical

graduates based on the results of a standardized computer-based test called
AMCAT conducted for more than 40,000 engineering and MCA students (in final
year) across the country1. AMCAT was conducted in more than 12 states under
proctored environment. AMCAT [1] covers all objective parameters for adjudging
employability in the IT/ ITes sector including English Communication,
Quantitative skills, problem-solving skills and Computer Science and
Programming skills. Employability figures are based on actual hiring benchmarks
on AMCAT scores set by multiple companies in IT/ITeS related sectors (for e.g.,
see [2]). Since the study is based on a standardized aptitude and skill test, not only
does it find the employability quotient, but also helps investigate skills that are
deficient in particular group of candidates with regard to different sectors.
The findings and inferences of the study are summarized as follows:
1. It is common to quote a blanket figure of 25% employability in the IT/ITeS
sector. Such a figure is incomplete and not very useful, since the criteria for IT
services, IT product, KPO (Knowledge Process Outsourcing), BPO and technical
support sectors are very different. There is a need to study employability in these
sectors individually.
a. The current study has found that employability with regard to IT product
companies is as low as 4.22 % (amongst computer/electronics related branches),
whereas employability with regard to IT services companies is 17.84%
(wherein the company gives 3-6 months of in-house
training) which is lower than the advertised figure of 25%. To be at the forefront of
innovation and achieve higher growth, it is necessary that higher-order work with
regard to product development and research grows in India apart from the services
industry. To facilitate the same, the product engineering employability needs to be
improved from the current figure of 4.22%. This requires greater focus on part of
institutions of higher education to impart quality education in Computer Science
and Programming. (Refer Table 1)
b. KPOs will find only 9.47% technical graduates employable.
c. Employability with regard to BPOs and Technical Support Jobs (TSJ) is 38.23%
and 25.88% respectively. This leaves a total of 61.77% students who require
training in both soft-skills and problem-solving skills to be eligible for any job in
the IT or ITeS sector.
d. It was investigated how many candidates will be employable at IT services
companies if they do not run 3-6 months in-house training and rather, put
candidates directly on projects. This is a long term need of the industry and
required for India to maintain its global edge in the IT services space. The figure
can be optimistically estimated to 5.97%. This is a concerning figure. For India to
maintain its competitive advantage, the educational institutions need to
produce industry-ready candidates. This requires substantial intervention on part
of higher education institutions to impart IT skills to students.

.CONCLUSION

These surveys are an eye-opener for the Indian higher educational institutions and
a pointer to the urgent need to upgrade and revise the course curriculum with
integration of vocational training in the undergraduate programmes & hands-on
training & skill development in technical & higher education courses. Instead of
focusing on 'enrollment', the HRD Ministry should focus on 'employability'. The
quality of education in the existing institutions should be increased to a level that
they should be able to compete with their overseas counterparts. Instead of
increasing the 'Gross Enrollment Ratio' from 12 to 30 per cent, the ministry should
target to increase the 'Gross Employability Ratio' from 25 to at least 50 per cent by
2020.We concur with Mr. Rajan Bharti Mittal, President, FICCI, who in a two-
days FICCI Higher Education Summit 2010, described education as the “biggest
game changer’’ for India as education was critical for sustained growth of the
Indian economy. He called for tax breaks and incentives to the private sector to
encourage investors to invest in vocational education, e-education, training and
skill development.
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