Mumbai metro rush hour.
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As India’s population inches past China’s, it remains burdened by a workforce with worthless degrees.
Small private colleges have been churning out incompetent graduates, Bloomberg reported.
This is because of colleges with incompetent teachers, irregular classes and outdated curricula.
Some of the tech world’s top executives, like Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, come from India’s top colleges. But scores of people with worthless degrees — who’ve graduated from lesser-known private institutes — lack the basic skills required to secure a job, per Bloomberg.
Small private colleges with incompetent teachers, irregular classes, outdated curricula, and no opportunities for on-the-job training, are making the country’s workforce more unemployable, per Bloomberg.
This glut of incompetent workers comes as India’s population is set to overtake China’s by mid-2023, per the United Nations.
“Calling such so-called degrees as being worthless would be by far an understatement,” Anil Sadgopal, a former dean of education at Delhi University, told Bloomberg. “When millions of young people are rendered unemployable every year, the entire society becomes unstable.”
A study by an employee assessment firm Wheebox revealed that half of all future graduates in India would be unemployable because of flaws in the country’s education system.
The country’s unemployment rate stands at 7.45% as of February, per the Indian news outlet, The Economic Times.
Bloomberg’s interviews with youths in India revealed several reasons for spending money on higher education, like boosting their economic status to attract better suitors for marriage, and getting government jobs.
While some colleges provide inadequate training, a private university in North India went one step further, and sold fake degrees.
An Indian government agency investigation found that Manav Bharti University in the northern state of Himachal Pradesh had sold up to 36,000 degrees since it was founded in 2009, per a South China Morning Post report in March 2021.
It had sold these qualifications for as low as $1,362, the SCMP reported.
Bloomberg’s report on India’s failing education system comes as India is set to overtake China as the world’s most populous country.
By mid-2023, India’s population is estimated to reach 1.4286 billion, 2.9 million more than China’s 1.4257 billion people, per the United Nations Population Fund’s “State of World Population Report.”
Representatives of Manav Bharti University did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.