Praveen: …so the NEP 2020, which came out five years ago… one of the things it did was fundamentally shift all this from, “Oh, let’s talk about degrees, let’s talk about education” to “Let’s talk about skills. Let’s do skill-based teaching.” 

They did several things, but one of them was: in the past, if you needed to get a PhD, you needed to do this thing called an M.Phil degree. It was sort of this bridge that you do after your Master’s. You spend a couple of years on it, and then you go and do a Phd. 

Now, the reason why you would always do an M.Phil earlier is because you’re basically spending a couple of years trying to figure out, is this really what I want to do? Do I want to spend my career doing research? Do I want to spend my career being an academic? So that friction essentially filters out people before they end up doing a PhD. 

But what they found out and what they thought was, “Oh, you know what? What’s really happening is a lot of people are dropping out of M.Phil.” So, you know what they did? They got rid of the M.Phil. And they said, “Now you can go to a PhD immediately after you do four years of undergrad.”

So, look at the intention. The intention is to make sure that you don’t really lose out and people end up finishing their PhD and becoming more, quote-unquote employable. But in some ways, it does the reverse

Maheswer Peri: A few decades back, you had ITIs, polytechnics, and engineering colleges. Today, the engineering colleges promise the ROI for an engineering graduate, but deliver an ITI level of education. 

The reason why it happened is, aspirationally, every parent wants their child to be an engineer, and they put them in an engineering college. In my time, I could not get into a polytechnic either. So, what’s happened is, aspirationally, we’re giving a degree which is engineering or B.Tech, but skill-set wise, or knowledge-wise, or understanding-wise, we’re generating an ITI kind of a thing. 

And by the way, nothing is big or small here. It is just about mapping your needs, your aptitude, your investment of time, energy, and resources into one thing versus the other, right? 

So, for me, the reason why college education is failing is because they are, of course, giving a degree, but the skill set that they are making their student learn is nothing compared to what a degree should be giving. 

So, college education is failing because they wanted to sell hope. If I were to put things in context, they sold hope because it’s a great business model. Selling hope and fear is always a great business model. It’s bound to fail from that perspective.

Abhishek Ghosh: Theoretically, we are all aware. But, see, what also drives this is so much insecurity. And sometimes I feel course correction is always very difficult, you know?

So, our life outcome is about all those small, small decisions that we have taken. So sometimes, to go back and correct this is very difficult. 

I come from the healthcare sector, right? So we look at it also from preventive health. So prevention of illness is what? It’s like you kind of put those hygiene checks and balances early on. 

So career counselling or planning for a career is also nothing very different from there. Because if you have made the wrong decisions now, it is very difficult to go back in time to correct it.