The changing face for Indian Higher Ed

I had a fascinating discussion today which I need to record here. 

The point is trivial - which kind of courses are in demand in Indian Higher Ed - but it was a big surprise for me. 

In the last several weeks, I have been talking to a lot of people in India. I spent a couple of weeks there, trying to figure out, after a gap of several months, what's exactly is happening so that I can put an India specific business proposition together. These conversations gave me a vague sense that a major shift is underway, but I couldn't quite figure out what that shift really is. Today, the penny dropped!

On the surface, the higher ed conversation in India remains the same as before. There is a lot of talk of industry-academia gap, though not much action! The hackathons and boot camps are everywhere. Academic calendars reflect an amazing variety of holidays and excruciating and endless sequence of examinations. Except for some campuses which are more political than any academic institution should be, there is very little awareness about big questions of life and society, unquestioning acceptance of various government slogans and India's self-evident greatness, complete disregard of nature, poor people and hygiene. 

And everyone seems to be studying Engineering and Business (sometimes, especially in Western India, Commerce). Or so I thought.

I noted last year that Engineering enrolments might be falling. It is unsurprising because very few engineers get jobs (depending on who you ask, the number is between 20% and 30%). But then, I saw Engineering colleges suddenly reinventing themselves as AI colleges and churned out courses (with little change in actual content) focused on AI/ML, Data Science and the like. True to form, AI experts appeared from nowhere. If I thought Silicon Valley defined AI poorly, India was a different degree of magnitude: Suddenly whoever had touched a computer keyboard claimed to have been blessed by AI! 

Therefore, I assumed that this is what we would hear for next few years: Everyone would be studying some form of AI engineering! However, while I was in India, I observed anecdotally that this might not be the case. To my surprise, people - students and their parents - were talking about other things. They were telling me Psychology, Physics and Maths are in-demand disciplines. They were talking about good liberal arts colleges rather than cracking the IIT, which I thought is the singular aspiration of any Indian student.

I ascribed these to job market dynamic and the fact that the entry level jobs are collapsing. It was an odd assumption: The collapse of IT jobs is happening now, and it will take a few years to percolate down to student preferences. It is only recently large Indian tech firms started large-scale redundancies, and the AI talent race is very much on. Whether or not they qualify for it, Indian students know more about Silicon Valley salaries than the rainfall expectations this monsoon in their own state! To sum it up, that Indian students are already factoring in the dampening job prospect in their educational choice was too optimistic a reading!

That brings me to today. I was talking to someone who made his career around job-ready courses. He was clearly despondent: The wheels have turned, he said, and people are preferring 'science and arts colleges' over engineering colleges, he said. His logic was different: He was telling me that this generation of parents want their children to be able to do which they wanted to do themselves but couldn't afford to do. In other words, they are showing abundance mindset, being optimistic about the world. They have taken seriously the claim that India will become a developed country in the next 10 years and lead the world in many sectors. Hence, the closet historian doesn't mind when his son wants to be a psychologist; the mum who had to do engineering degree to get married encourages her daughter to study literature and dream of being a writer. 

It is so surprising, but I could intuitively agree. This is one thing I struggled with while I was in India: My gloomy AI-will-take-our-job or there-comes-Putin sentiments were rarely shared. I worried that democracy is in trouble: My Indian friends were happily watching government propaganda on 'coordinated' TV and proclaiming the virtue of world's largest democracy. Europe has made me a pessimist, so it is hard for me to understand why my Indian friends are so optimistic.

Therefore, I saw the collapse of engineering enrolment through my usual dark lens but forgot to notice the shift. And, even when I saw the shift, my explanation was negative, regardless of the perfect plausibility of the alternative positive explanation. 

I shall sign off today puzzled but happy. Puzzled, because I have this gnawing feeling that the optimism is misplaced; but happy, because there is hope.