For generations, the Indian middle-class family has operated on an unwavering economic principle: a professional degree means a prosperous life. Parents have liquidated bank FDs and mortgaged gold to fund degrees like Engineering, MBBS, and MBA. The degree has become not just education, but a social contract, embodying the dream of a successful life—a dream that is now fading.
………
For professional degrees, bank loans have reached up to ₹30 to ₹40 lakh, while starting salaries remain stuck at ₹4 to ₹6 lakh per annum. According to the Finance Global Economic Outlook 2026, in rapidly changing circumstances, the expectations Indian families have from their children’s professional degrees are beginning to seem futile. The question every family is raising about the current education system today is that while education costs are increasing by 10 to 15 percent every year, there is no similar annual growth in starting salaries. This gap will not fill itself; it is the result of a system that has no accountability toward those it claims to serve.
……
The Myth of the Guaranteed Job and the Rise of Skills
……………………………………………………………………..
The era of the social contract where a degree guaranteed a job has ended. There should be an education system that does not measure itself by how many students enrolled, but by how many it truly empowered to move forward. Consider the total cost of making a software developer from an average college. The fee for a B.Tech course alone is ₹12 to ₹15 lakh. Adding the previous 13 years of schooling, the total investment exceeds ₹20 lakh, while the starting salary is only ₹4 to ₹5 lakh per annum. Analysis of over 1,000 job advertisements in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Pune revealed that AI and Data Science jobs are offering 20 to 40 percent higher salaries than traditional IT for the same experience level. Degrees are becoming rapidly irrelevant, and everything now rests on skill specialization.
…………
The Crisis of Supply and Quality
…………………………………………………………………
More than any other country in the world, about 15 lakh engineering graduates pass out in India every year, but there are no jobs for such a massive number. The Unstop Talent Report 2025 surveyed over 30,000 people and found that 83 percent of the 2025 batch of engineering graduates are wandering in search of jobs without employment or internships; more than 12 lakh youth and their families made huge economic sacrifices, but the result was nothing. The situation with MBAs is only slightly better. More than 5,000 institutes are offering MBA or PGDM courses. The supply has far exceeded the number of quality jobs. Even at IIM Indore, where fees range from ₹20 to ₹25 lakh, the average placement salary fell by nearly 15 percent between 2023 and 2024. Every fourth graduate from the top 30 business schools remained without a job at graduation.
…………
The Mismatch Between Education and Industry
………………………………………………………………….
The Mercer-Mettl India Graduate Skill Index 2025 delivers the harshest verdict: only 42.6 percent of Indian graduates are considered industry-ready, and this figure has barely improved in a decade. Unemployment among youth aged 20 to 24 is approximately 44.5 percent. We are not producing graduates who are ‘unemployable’ because they are bad students; we are producing them because the system is designed to be mismatched. This crisis is not about having too many graduates; it is entirely a crisis of mismatched education. The curricula of hundreds of engineering colleges have not changed since the early 2000s. Many faculty members have spent their entire careers in academia and have never worked in the industry. Placement cells merely send a few emails in the last semester and consider that to be infrastructure.
……….
A Need for Global Reform
…………………………………………………..
The Wheebox India Skills Report 2025 confirms that only 45 percent of graduates are considered industry-ready. This is a scathing blow to a system that spends 4 years and ₹15 to ₹20 lakh to prepare youth for jobs they cannot perform. This mismatch is not an accident. It is the predictable outcome of a system that increased admissions like a business model without simultaneously increasing relevant curricula, real project experience, or placement rigor. India does not need to find new solutions, but rather the willpower to adopt them. Germany’s dual training model provides training between vocational schools and paid on-the-job work across more than 300 state-recognized programs. Germany’s youth unemployment is the lowest in Europe. Apprentices receive salaries during training, and the debt trap common in Indian education does not exist in Germany.
………..
Moving Toward a Skills-First Future
……………………………………………………………………
Singapore’s ‘SkillsFuture’ initiative gives every citizen over 25 government-funded credits for lifelong upskilling. By 2024, 24,000 companies were sending 2.41 lakh employees for SkillsFuture training annually. By the year 2024, about 80 percent of jobs in Singapore no longer required academic qualifications. Employers have made skills and proven capability the yardstick for recruitment. South Korea’s Meister High Schools partnered with major employers to create specialized industry programs, turning vocational paths into routes where graduates achieve over 90 percent employment with salaries equivalent to university graduates. India’s education system is still raising an army of degree holders for an economy that the rest of the world is moving away from. Engineering and management courses are still teaching the 2010 syllabus. These must be created in collaboration with industry partners and updated every year.
About the Author
