The Degree That Promised Everything

Somewhere in this country this morning, a man who cannot write his own name reached his workplace by seven, loading sacks, laying brick, pulling a cart. His neighbour's son holds a degree. At eleven, the son was still at home, on a phone his father paid for, refreshing a job portal.

The numbers say it more coldly. The International Labour Organisation, in its India Employment Report 2024 prepared with the Institute for Human Development, put the jobless rate among young graduates at 29.1 per cent. Among young people who can neither read nor write, 3.4 per cent. Nine times. For those who finished school or went a little further, 18.4 per cent. Those figures are for 2022 and nothing since has softened the shape they describe. By then the educated share of India's unemployed young had climbed from 54.2 per cent in 2000 to 65.7 per cent, and roughly eighty-three of every hundred unemployed people in this country were young.

The more the schooling, the longer the wait. It is worth reading again: the more the schooling, the longer the wait.

And the machinery producing the schooling has never run faster. The Ministry of Education's own survey counts 4.5 crore students enrolled in higher education in 2023-24, with the gross enrolment ratio touching thirty, which is thirty out of every hundred young Indians of college age sitting in a classroom somewhere. Every summer a few million walk out holding a degree and a photograph in a rented gown.

Now, what is everybody saying? The education system has failed. That is the first sentence of almost every article you will read on this topic. I want to say the opposite, and I want to say it plainly. The system has not failed. The system has been magnificent. It has delivered superbly over well over a century. What must be asked is something else. What was it designed to do, and hence what has it delivered?

It was designed to take in human beings and convert them into functional economic units. That was the design. A five-year-old goes in, seventeen years pass, and a functional economic unit comes out, ready to be absorbed by an order that wanted exactly that. The system delivered.

Look at what a college says about itself and the design goal is not even hidden. Ninety-four per cent placed. Highest package this, average package that. We fall and grovel at placement figures, don't we? And what is this thing called placement? Absorption of the individual into the social and economic order, is that not what placement is? Admissions office at one end, placement office at the other, and in between, an assembly line. Call the building a university if that helps. But what happenes if the order stops wanting the unit?

The Factory Moved

Can you blame the car if it doesn't travel to the moon? It was never the design goal. The car does what it was built to do and does it well. So before you fault any system, find out what its maker intended.

The engineer was made for a certain kind of factory. That was the design. What nobody wrote into the design was the relationship between the engineer and the factory, because nobody expected the factory to go anywhere. The factory moved on. Of course it did: things change, the world changes, that is the nature of time. And when it moved, the engineer stood exactly where he was, holding a qualification cut for a floor that no longer exists.

That much is economics and every newspaper can recite it. Something else happened on that campus, and it is in no report.

The campus did not merely train him. It trained him to take the training as his identity. He did not come away with a skill. He came away with a self. Four years of a department, a roll number, a grade average, a placement bracket, and at the end of it a young man who no longer says he studied engineering. He says he is an engineer.

Vedanta has a name for what just happened, and the name is ahankaar, the ego. Not arrogance, whatever the English usage suggests. The ego is the false centre, the sense of being somebody in particular, and its one permanent difficulty is that it owns nothing of its own. It must borrow. It borrows a caste, a language, a jersey, a party. Hand it four years and a certificate and it will borrow that too, and hold on far longer than the certificate is worth.

Identities are frozen things. A skill you can put down and pick up another. An identity you cannot, because once it is in place there is nobody left over to do the putting down. So when the ground shifts, the identity does not adapt. When change happens, identities panic.

From outside, the panic looks like laziness. He will not take the job at the dealership in the next town. Standing at a counter is out of the question. Work exists three hours away and he does not go, because the work does not match the thing he has become. Meanwhile, he takes money from a father who has done exactly such work for thirty years and never once called it beneath him.

Listen to how the refusal argues. "Four years for a degree, and now a billing counter?" "What will be said of him at the next wedding?" And behind both, the sentence the family has repeated for three years and can no longer take back: he is an engineer.

Call it entitlement and you have named the behaviour without touching it. Offer him the same wage for the same work under a title that flatters him and watch how fast the objection dissolves. He is not defending his income. He is defending a picture, and the picture will be defended even at the cost of the man carrying it.

Look at the document he keeps sending out. A curriculum vitae is meant to record what a person has done. His records what he was promised: institution, percentage, project title, the name of a firm where he sat for six weeks. Every line is a receipt for something bought. Not one line is an account of anything made.

And here is what should disturb him more than any unemployment figure. The market has already stopped believing in his label. He has not. The thirteenth India Skills Report, put together by ETS with the CII, the AICTE, the AIU and Taggd, drawing on more than a lakh candidates through its employability test and on employers across seven sectors, puts national employability at 56.35 per cent. Turn that around and close to half of those assessed were judged not ready for the work they had been prepared for. The report's larger finding is about what employers now look at. Hiring is moving toward portfolios, micro-credentials and industry certifications, away from the formal diploma. The employer is asking what he can do. He is still announcing what he is.

Ivan Illich saw much of this half a century ago. He described the school as an institution that manufactures dependence, so that being taught gets mistaken for learning and a certificate for competence. He was right, and then he stopped where every reformer stops. His remedy was institutional: pull down the school, unbundle the credential, build networks instead. Pull down every school in this country tomorrow. The same borrowing centre will turn up at the gate of whatever replaces them, asking the new thing for the identity the old thing used to supply. Illich went after the building. The building was never the trouble.

So when this is reported as a skills gap, understand that it is nothing of the sort. The collision is between the expectations from the product and the very nature of the product. Nobody misjudged the demand. What was misjudged was what was being supplied.

Not a Disruption but a Revelation

Now the machine arrives, and at last the panic has a face to blame.

Take the mythology off it first. AI is a code. It is a programmable output. It can do only the work it has been made and deployed to do, and beyond that it can do nothing. However much it is called sentient, however much it is called aware, it is still only a physical machine.

One thing follows, and it is not what is being shouted about. AI can remove human beings only from that work which was mechanical anyway, which was programmable anyway. Work you could lay out in a flow chart. Do this, then this, then send it upward for approval. AI can never actually become a substitute for a human being, because a human being is not a machine. Unless, of course, the human being has made himself into one.

Is AI actually a threat that must be responded to? Not really. AI is not a disruption; it is rather a revelation. And here is the question I would put to the engineering colleges of this country, the ones I studied in included. Is it not revealing, if what I have been taught over four years can be taken over by a machine, by a system that has zero self-knowledge? If four years can be handed over to a thing that has no self to examine, what exactly were those four years?

The figures are already in. A study by Cognizant and Pearson this June, surveying 750 HR leaders across India, the United States and Britain, found thirty-seven per cent of entry-level tasks in India already being performed by AI, against a global average of thirty-three, with nearly one in five of those leaders saying the machine now handles half or more of entry-level work.

Nomura's economists, going through sixty-nine documented company cases across Asia between 2022 and August this year, counted 83,100 hires in India tied to the technology against 31,921 layoffs and attrition, and then noticed the detail that spoils the comfort of that ratio. The ones walking out are almost never the ones walking in. In the same report, an ICRIER survey of 651 Indian IT firms has fifty-five per cent reporting a fall in entry-level hiring against fourteen per cent at senior level, and net hiring across Indian IT down to around 140,000 last financial year from 600,000 four years earlier. Globally, the Labour Organisation's youth report in August puts unemployment among the young at 12.4 per cent, some sixty-seven million people, with 257 million in neither work nor study nor training, and 6.1 per cent of jobs held by young people sitting in occupations highly exposed to these systems.

You are reading those as a forecast. They are not a forecast. They are a disclosure of what the work already was.

So the complaint is misdated. Everybody is saying the machine is taking the work. The mistake is not that AI is now snatching that work away from us. The mistake was that we accepted that work in the first place. We should never have been doing it, because we are human beings.

Let the machine do the machine's work. Why should a human being do the machine's work?

A tool that can be handed a target and trusted to reach it has been the definition of a good employee for two hundred years: punctual, repeatable. Then a better one is assembled out of silicon and the newspapers are shocked. If four years went into learning to be reliable, and reliability now costs a fraction and takes no lunch break, the quarrel is not really with the machine; it is with a bargain entered willingly and never once examined.

Turn it around, and something else appears. Seen one way, AI has come to give us release from our mechanical work. The work it is taking was never work that deserved a human life, and its loss is a loss only to the one who had already agreed to be an instrument. AI is the instrument. The human being is supposed to be the master of that instrument, and so the human being will have to lift himself off the level of an instrument.

Watch the new label being stitched on even now. Not an engineer any more, an AI-enabled professional. Old wine, new bottle, and in five years the same silence in the same house.

The machine, for its part, has no inner ache in it. Nothing in it is missing, so nothing in it reaches. It will not be disturbed by a burning summer or by its own emptiness, and it will never stop in the middle of a task to ask what it has become. AI can cogitate. And the human being? He can observe himself. Of the two parties to this quarrel, only one is built for self-observation. And that party is at home, refreshing the job portal.

The Paper Said He Was Finished

Every answer on offer is additive: reskill, upskill, add a certification, then another, and when those expire, add whatever replaced them.

And what does lifelong learning mean in ordinary use? It is basically a statement of anxiety. Unless you keep updating yourself, unless you keep upskilling yourself, you may find you are no longer employable, almost like a credit card subscription that you must renew every year. Otherwise, you find you are out of credit. That is not a love of learning; that is fear in a respectable coat, calling itself a philosophy of education.

And adaptability, the thing every conference now wants put into the curriculum, cannot be taught at all. It is not a layer you put on over what you already are. Adaptability is what naturally remains when the ego identity is removed. You cannot teach adaptability. You can unteach rigidity. Instead, the campuses train students into identities made of their departments, their certificates, their grades, their packages. Take away the rigidity and the flexibility is simply there, as it always was, waiting for the furniture to be moved.

Which brings the whole matter back to the certificate, and to what the certificate actually said. Read it again. Under the seal and the signature, past the Latin nobody translates, one line is printed in ink you cannot see, and the line says: you are complete, you may stop now, go and be absorbed.

And so he does. I am the one who has arrived. I am the one who is finished. Done. Out to declare my position, earn, and consume. That is what the world calls a good life. Learning stops there, not for want of courses but because a finished thing has no reason to learn anything. Ask him why he needs to read those books. He will say it gives him acceptance and placement. Ask him why he needs that. He will mumble something. Go deeper, repeat the question, and he will get irritated, because he has no answer, because he has no understanding.

An older version of this refusal opens the Gita. A man stands in the middle of the field he has trained his whole life for, looks at the work in front of him, and puts his weapons down. He does not say he is frightened. He says the work is ignoble, that nothing good can come of it, and he argues it beautifully for a full chapter. Krishna does not accept the argument. He names it a weakness of heart wearing the costume of principle, and he will not let Arjuna keep the costume.

That is the scene playing in a few million homes tonight, with smaller stakes and better clothes. The job is beneath me. Why should a graduate stand there? Something better was promised. Every word of it is offered as discernment, and underneath sits something far plainer, which is that this particular work will not feed the picture, and the picture is all he has.

So when he says a job is beneath him, hand the question back. Beneath what? Beneath whom? No height exists there except the one printed on a sheet of paper, and that paper was issued by an office that has never met him, on behalf of a factory that has shut its gates.

He will say, reasonably enough, that if he lets the picture go he will have nothing left, that a man must be something. Notice where that fear is manufactured. It is not evidence that the identity is holding him up; it is the identity generating terror about its own removal, the way a moneylender explains to you the dangers of a life without loans. The question "if not this, then what?" is produced by the very thing being asked to go. Let it go and the question goes with it, unanswered and no longer in need of an answer.

The man loading sacks this morning has never had to ask any of this. Nothing was ever printed about him that he now has to defend. That is not a virtue and I am not recommending his life to anybody; poverty is not wisdom, and nobody should romanticise a back that gives out at fifty. But he carries one burden fewer, and it is exactly the burden the degree installed. He has no picture to feed.

Seventeen years went into the graduate. He was educated to become something. He was not educated to unbecome what he had erroneously become.

And I am not going to finish by describing the work that would befit him instead. The moment such work is described, it becomes one more thing to acquire, one more label to wear until that one expires too, and the whole arrangement starts again with a fresh certificate and the same man inside it.

He is asking which job is worthy of his degree. A reasonable question, and no answer to it will hold for long. Another question has been standing there the whole time, through all seventeen years, unasked in every classroom he passed through and in every interview he has sat in since. Nobody asked it of him, but it is one every youth should ask themselves: What is standing there when the degree is set down?

Acharya Prashant is a philosopher and author whose work centres on self-inquiry and its application to contemporary life; Views presented are personal.