‘Our colleges don’t ready students for jobs’: Nirmala Sitharaman says our system only produces degree-holding youngsters

Indian colleges and courses do not prepare students for employment, said Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman. She said that our colleges mostly produce “degree-holding youngsters” but instead we need to produce students who are either prepared for the job market or to become entrepreneurs.

FM Sitharaman, in an interview to The Indian Express, said most of us graduate from colleges but “they don’t ready you for jobs”. They don’t even prepare you to become an entrepreneur, she said. “You don’t need to go and work for somebody. You can do something yourself. But the courses don’t give you enough,” she said.

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The minister compared Indian colleges to colleges from developed nations, where the students get the option to pursue the subject they are interested in or “go for a local technical university which teaches one particular skill and then also tells you how to go about handling that skill and what are the things that you can do with that skill”. She said they are also told how far they can get ahead in terms of management with that particular skill. “So, that readies you for the marketplace, either to become an employee to somebody or to do your own thing,” she said.

“Our university courses don’t have that. They give you a certificate, which is a bachelor’s degree, of something. If you have done economics or political science, what do you do with it afterwards? After BA, what do you do? You go for an MA. But after an MA, you need to have something,” she said.

The minister said that our system produces “certified or degree-holding youngsters, but they were not ready yet for handling themselves, either as an employee or themselves to start off something”. The minister said this needed to be fixed.

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Sitharaman said the government school needs an overhaul. There must be a “mindset change” and not only money.

Speaking about the students’ protest at Jantar Mantar, Sitharaman said: “I am not sure there is an alternative that I can think of now. What has happened has happened. With the benefit of hindsight, there’s no good talking I could have done it this way or we should have handled it this way. That’s just not possible.”