With every passing year, the period of February to May is becoming more and more stressful for children studying in classes IX to XII and probably more so for their parents. Based on demographic information, and the current school and college enrolment data, this could mean about 30 million children in these classes in school, and about four million who would be seeking admission to a graduate degree programme this year after they complete their Class XII examinations. Almost a tenth of these would be aspiring to become engineers, and then a very large number trying to compete for the limited number of seats in other professional domains such as medicine, law, design and architecture. By default, most of those who are not able to make it to any of these professional streams will end up taking admission into general science and arts courses with a belief that they will follow it up with a good MBA degree and thereby improve their career prospects. Since there is much more demand for all professional seats than the availability, it is no surprise that parents and their children start feeling the pressure many years before the children actually reach the milestone where they have to take some decisions, and in some extreme instances, parents start getting paranoid almost as soon the child enters Class I itself!
Is the higher education situation really so bad that it warrants this ever-increasing stress on Indian children and parents? It is, indeed, true that the capacity creation for higher education, across various disciplines, has not kept pace with the increases in population and in primary school enrolment. With the number of births per year having touched almost 24 million in the early 1990s, and a desired 25 per cent or more of these to be college-going if India is to catch up with developed countries like the US and Japan (and China), almost six million college seats are required in the 2009 school-leaving year. Against this, the total number is below four million and that includes all seats irrespective of their quality and geographic clustering. If the government does not liberalise the education sector immediately, and encourage massive public as well as private investment in this sector, India will have the youngest population in the world which is also the least educated. What is even more worrisome is the lopsided addition of higher education capacity. For example, India certainly needs more engineers especially in the context of the massive investment needs in basic infrastructure including construction, power, telecommunication and manufacturing. Yes, of the estimated 300,000 engineering seats available each year, a disproportionately high number is focused on information technology while a very low number is available for disciplines such as civil, material, bio-medical and industrial engineering. For an economy that is just about 7 per cent the size of the US, India has almost 50 per cent more seats for MBA and even more disturbingly, a rapidly expanding availability of seats for more exotic versions such as BBA. For all the talk about massive investment in the real estate sector over the next 20 years, there are less than 5,000 seats available for architecture, and less than 1,000 seats for industrial design, whereas there are over 5,000 seats available for fashion design notwithstanding the fact that a majority of these fashion design graduates just fade away in buying houses and garment exporters’ offices doing anything but actual design of garments and accessories. Likewise, against a current deficit (and increasing each year) of almost 500,000 doctors, the total intake of fresh students is less than 40,000 per year.
There is, however, a big emerging silver line, provided the parents see it that way. As the economy grows on a base of $1 trillion in economic output, and with very fundamental shifts in the demographic, consumption, lifestyle and urbanisation patterns across India, the nature of white collar professional jobs will also undergo a very fundamental change. In white collar graduate and postgraduate level jobs category, India is likely to see an addition of as many as 10 million new jobs in the top 10 sectors alone (and about 40 million overall in these top 10 sectors) during the 2009-2018 period. Of these, retail and consumer product sectors alone will add about three million graduate and postgraduate level jobs, followed by 1.5 million in healthcare and pharmaceuticals, about 1.4 million in engineering goods, about 1.4 million in automotive sector, about 1.2 million in telecommunication, and about 1.1 million in IT and ITES. In addition, millions of small and medium entrepreneurial opportunities will emerge in sectors such as health and well-being, fitness, hospitality and tourism, education including vocational training, media and entertainment, travel and transportation etc. Thus, the school-leaving children today are not constrained by the traditionally safe career choices such as engineering, medicine, law and accountancy. Myriad new genres of very exciting career choices already exist, many of which do not really require highly specialised graduate or postgraduate degrees, but instead, some vocational training or short-duration specialisation courses.
Hence, it would be a very good idea for parents of school-leaving children to spend some time understanding these systemic changes and then help their children plan their future accordingly.
