Selva at the Scientific Indian has some interesting thoughts about whether Indian college education is really “worth it”

Unfortunately, he makes the issue a tad more confusing than it ought to be, because he mixes up the questions of whether college education is “worth it” for the student, whether you actually learn anything there, and whether society gets its money’s worth for what it spends on the student.

A college education is definitely “worth it” for a student, when you compare it with the alternative of not getting a college education. But that is not because they actually learn anything there as part of the curriculum. I suspect the main use of college education from an employer’s point of view is that it is a good shortlisting mechanism. If you specify in your job specs that you require “at least a graduate”, you will get hundreds of applicants as against tens of thousands.
Now this shortlist of hundreds will be of better quality than the long list of ten thousand because they will be, on an average smarter.
This is not because college makes you smarter, but because smarter people go through college. At least, this used to be the case perhaps 20 years back. At that time, going through college used to mean that you were either smart or rich, or some combination of the two. Very poor people would have put their son (but not their daughter) through college only if he was very very smart. Very rich brats would go through college regardless of how well they did in school. Of course, there would be an entire spectrum in between.

Now of course, the entire middle-class sends all its kids through college, so college as such does not act as a good filter. Engineering education is the now filtration plant, replacing college education.
(There are exceptions to this. Most medical students do go on to become doctors. There are some engineering jobs where your job is roughly correlated to what you learnt. You can do a degree in clinical psychology and go on to become a psychologist. But I think I am right in assuming that such jobs are exceptions)

From a society’s point of view, this whole thing is a waste. No one is better off for participating in this rat race. Besides, the race is biased in favour of the rich, because even if college fees are not much, the opportunity cost of staying out of the job market while you are getting “educated” weighs more heavily on the poor.

I am sorry, but I do not have a solution to the problem. Or rather, I have many solutions, but the problem won’t go away completely.

The first solution is that as opportunities improve, the problem will reduce. If an employer is faced with the problem of keeping employees rather than sifting through resumes, he will naturally relax the criterion of “college education” This will also mean that the market will respond (at least, if the government recognises that the field of education is a market and allows it to respond) with specific short term courses tailored to specific jobs.

But then, I am not a fan of the education system training you for specific jobs, as Selva is. In a dynamic economy, it is unfair to expect that the field you choose around the age of 20 remain static throughout your life. In a fast moving economy, industries will be created and destroyed in a matter of years and the specific skills that are required of its members will change rapidly. So perhaps it is better to go through courses which give you good conceptual skills rather than skills that help you in a specific job?

I don’t really know. But anyway this is a dilemma that you will face in any college system. This is not specific to the Indian system. I am sure that the Indian system has unique pathologies of its own, about which I would have written if I weren’t sleepy after a heavy lunch.