Universities prepare students for industry
As Indian higher education moves towards a more industry-aligned, flexible and employability-focused future, the relationship between universities and the world of work is undergoing a significant transformation. In conversation with The Pioneer, Vikas Rai Bhatnagar, Group Vice Chancellor, Chandigarh University, shares his perspective on the gaps between education and industry, the role of experiential learning, the impact of NEP 2020 and the changes needed to prepare students for an evolving professional landscape
India has expanded access to higher education significantly. Why is that still not translating into enough employable graduates?
Access used to be the biggest challenge for students outside Tier 1 cities. Online education has changed that in ways a physical campus never could on its own. But access without industry connection only creates more degree-holders, not more employable professionals. That is the real gap today: at Chandigarh University Online, we have expanded reach faster than we have built the bridge between education and industry.
Much of what is called industry-academia collaboration today is still limited to a guest lecture that is rarely revisited. What is actually missing is industry being involved in curriculum design from day one, helping decide what students learn, not simply commenting on it after the fact. When that connection is built properly, the difference is visible. Students stop asking, “What will be on the exam?” and start asking, “Would this solution hold up in a real client meeting?”
If higher education is serious about employability, the answer is not simply more access, more courses, or more degrees. It is building a system where industry shapes what is taught, assessment measures how students think and solve problems, and faculty are continuously equipped to teach what the market actually demands.
What are graduates still missing when they step from the classroom into the workplace?
Judgment. Employers aren’t complaining that graduates don’t know enough, most of them know plenty. The complaint I hear most is that graduates can’t operate with ambiguity. Give them a well-defined problem with a textbook method and they’ll execute it well. Give them a messy brief, half the data missing, three stakeholders wanting different things, and they freeze. That’s not a knowledge gap, it’s an exposure gap, and the only way to close it is to stop treating industry exposure as a guest lecture and start treating it as a co-taught module.
That’s the thinking behind bringing organisations like KPMG, Microsoft, PwC and PMI directly into the classroom at Chandigarh University Online, not as one-off speakers but as people who help shape what’s taught and grade what students produce against a live brief. When a PMI-certified practitioner working on building a curriculum, the classroom stops being a simulation of work and starts being an early draft of it
Industry-academia partnerships have existed for years. Why have they largely failed to deliver the kind of industry exposure students actually need?
Stop calling it “collaboration” and start calling it “co-ownership.” Most industry-academia partnerships I’ve seen are a guest lecture, a signed MoU, a photo, and then silence for a year. Nobody’s job depends on the partnership succeeding, so it doesn’t.
What works is when a company puts a real business problem on the table with a real deadline, and a faculty member’s course grade depends on how well students solved it, not how well they memorised the theory behind it. We’ve run this model with corporate partners on some of our online postgraduate programmes: students work in teams against a live brief and get evaluated by people who must live with decisions like that in their own jobs. It changes the tenor of the classroom completely.
The other change needed is longer commitment windows. A one-semester partnership barely lets you calibrate the brief. Three years in, you start seeing which students the model actually transforms.
Five years after NEP 2020, has the policy genuinely changed the way Indians access and experience higher education?
For online degree education specifically, NEP has done more than any single policy before it. Multiple entry and exit, the academic credit bank, and the formal recognition of ODL and online programmes at par with on-campus ones have together made it legitimate and not a fallback option for a working adult to build a degree over time instead of in one uninterrupted stretch. I’ve watched learners in their thirties and forties, already employed, resume an education they’d abandoned a decade earlier so that they could move up in their careers. That’s the policy doing exactly what it was designed to do.
If you could redesign Indian higher education from scratch, what are the three changes you would make first?
First, make industry-embedded, evaluated project work a mandatory graduation requirement for every degree not an optional internship a student can skip, a live external brief with real accountability built into the grade. Second, give online and on-campus degrees genuine parity in the eyes of employers and regulators, not just on paper - same rigour, same recognition, no asterisk. Third, build a funded national infrastructure for continuous faculty upskilling, with protected time attached, not another circular asking colleges to “encourage” it.
If I had to rank them, I’d start with the industry-embedded requirement, because it forces the other two to happen anyway. You can’t run a mandatory live-project model without faculty who are current enough to supervise it credibly. Change what a degree requires students to actually do, and the rest of the system has no choice but to catch up.
A degree may tell employers what a graduate knows, but it doesn’t always show how they will perform at work. The real gap is judgment. When faced with incomplete data, unclear briefs and competing demands, many graduates struggle. Industry exposure can help bridge that gap
