How India’s colleges under-prepare students when it comes to competing for the jobs of the future
I have interacted, over the last two decades, with many of our incoming international graduate students a large majority with undergraduate degrees from public and private universities from India. In the recent years, there appears to be a consistent gap in the educational training of incoming graduate students that can be broadly categorised into the following areas of concern.
Applied knowledge theoretical emphasis: Students initially struggle in postgraduate courses because of the complete disconnect between their theoretical undergraduate education and its application to practice. For example, we have seen that many students claim to know programming languages based on their undergraduate work, but appear unable to translate these skills into an ability to solve practical business or applied research problems.
Critical inquiry: Students have difficulty pushing the envelope in their thinking because of an apparent lack of critical enquiry abilities leading to an inability to evaluate options logically and coherently . The fact is: A postgraduate education and employability requires students to have the capability to think clearly and rationally about issues, as well as engage in reflective, independent, and deep thinking.
Entrepreneurial thinking: Despite the many successful IIT IIM and other alums from famous Indian institutions who have been pioneering innovators starting new businesses, and others who are senior leaders in multinational organisations, an even large number of graduates of Indian origin rarely feel prepared to think entrepreneurially . This mindset requires an early training of the mind to be open to creativity, “Imagineering“, and innovation in one’s thinking.
Academic integrity: Both in the UK and US there has been growing concern about plagiarism and or cheating by international students in recent media stories. We face this issue of academic integrity each semester in our institution and unfortunately this happens to be the situation with many of the students who come from India. This concern appears to be also prevalent in Indian campuses, both in education and research. Of course, part of the problem lies at the feet of the professors who do not put in the necessary effort to change assignments and exams each term. However, a large part of the onus is on the academic institutions of higher learning that should prepare ethical students for work and or higher studies. Clearly , this is an issue every university student has to really understand, particularly in an age of ubiquitous access to information. We as educators also need to become responsible for formally teaching our students about academic integrity .
Multidisciplinarity: The jobs of the future will require a thoughtful multidisciplinary perspective in addressing real world problems. This ability to draw insights from multiple referent disciplines to solve complex societal and business challenges is becoming an essential skill and will impact the ability of people to innovate and think creatively .Students seem to be underprepared to do so with the current focus of undergraduate education in India that generally uses a lockstep cohort based curriculum allowing very little flexibility in studying the inherent relationship of disciplines on each other.
As India deals with the ongoing explosive demand for higher education and the enormous interest and growth in its entrepreneur class, both existing and emerging public and private Indian universities will need to address these growing areas of concern. In my opinion, these concerns have to do with underlying foundations of the Indian education system. This will necessarily involve a serious discussion and rethinking retooling of the undergraduate curriculum and its regulation by the government in ways that deliberatively integrate skills and ideas such as projectbased learning, paid internships and co-op opportunities, critical inquiry , entrepreneurial thinking, multidisciplinary cross-disciplinary perspectives, and academic professional ethics.
However, none of these actions are panaceas for success; as a society we need to demand much more from ourselves as students, educators and regulators. The American activist and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King Jr, argued that “the function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character that is the goal of true education“. I believe that India’s history and tradition as a nation dating back to the educational models developed at Nalanda provide the foundations for this imperative where the ethical, critical discussion of ideas is the norm rather than the exception.
DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.
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