The article deals with state of the education and its relation with employment in India.

Improving higher education system

• Improving India’s higher education justice and worker productivity needs the broadening of our education ambition.
• Our focus on Gross Enrollment Ratio should also be anchored to Employed Learner Ratio -proportion of our 55 crore labour force in formal learning.
• For enrolling five crore new employed learners, India needs five regulatory changes.

Reflecting on global and domestic education experience

• Multi-decade structural changes include  organisations that are less hierarchical, lower longevity, shorter employee tenures, higher competition.
• There is also change in the form of work: capitalism without capital, soft skills valued more than hard skills, 30 per cent working from home etc.
• There change in the form of education in which Google knows everything, so tacit knowledge is more valuable than codified or embedded knowledge.
• These shifts are complicated by a new world of politics, third-party financing viability, and fee inflation.

India faces financing failure in skill

• We have 3.8 crore students in 1,000-plus universities and 50,000-plus colleges.
• We confront a financing failure in skills:
• Employers are not willing to pay for training of candidates but a premium for trained candidates.
• Candidates are not willing to pay for training but for jobs.
• Financiers are unwilling to lend unless a job is guaranteed, and training institutions can’t fill their classrooms.

Steps need to be taken

• For many people the income support of learning-while-earning is crucial to raising enrollment.
• Many students lack employability and workers lack productivity because learning is supply-driven.
• Learning-by-doing ensures demand-driven learning.
• The de facto ban on online degree learning with only seven of our 1,000-plus universities licensed for online offerings.
• That needs to be changed.
• High regulatory hurdles creates an adverse selection among entrepreneurs running educational institutions.

Five regulatory changes

• First, modify Part 3 of the UGC Act 1956 and Part 8 of the UGC Act to include skill universities.
• Second, remove clauses 3(A), 3(B), and clause 5 of UGC ODL and Online Regulations 2020 and replace them with a blanket and automatic approval for all accredited universities to design, develop and deliver their online programmes.
• Third, modify clause 4(C)(ii) of UGC online regulations 2020 to allow innovation, flexibility, and relevance in an online curriculum as prescribed in Annex 1-(V)-3-i) that allows universities to work closely with industry on their list of courses.
• Fourth, modify clauses 13(C)(3), 13(C)(5), 13(C)(7), 18(2) of UGC online regulations 2020 to permit universities to create partner ecosystems for world-class online learning services, platforms, and experience.
• Fifth, introduce Universities in clause 2 of the Apprentices Act 1961 to enable all accredited universities to introduce, administer and scale all aspects of degree apprenticeship programs.
• These five changes would enable enrolling five crore incremental employed learner.

Conclusion

Reforming education requires thinking horizontally, holistically, and imaginatively. The reforms suggested here should be carried out considering these aspects.

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