Twenty-first century India with a service dominated economy and technology embedded products needs qualified self-employed professionals and workers which in turn requires a shift from general purpose degrees to professional degrees. This will also minimise our army of the educated unemployed.
The current tertiary mass education sector was designed for the needs of British India of the early twentieth century and the clerically intensive needs of public sector business in the latter half of that century.
Thus the emphasis was on producing armies of clerks, accountants and laboratory technicians with BAs, BComs and BScs. The shifting structure of the economy has resulted in an increase in the masses of educated unemployed with these general purpose educational qualifications but no skills that are any longer useful or relevant.
These educated unemployed are the principal concern of leaders in the growing number of urban centres in India. With over half the population expected to be in urban areas in the not so distant future, the problem is not an "elitist" one, as politicians may be tempted to dismiss without any attempt at solution.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, it is time to redesign our tertiary sector and focus on professional degrees that produce persons with useful skills and the necessary depth in the respective fields.
Nothing illustrates this better than a recent article in a leading newspaper in a developed country which highlighted the travails of an automobile owner to solve an apparently simple and minor problem of switching off an interior dome light in his car.
It turned out that the light was designed to slowly fade out after a decent interval to permit passengers to disembark and walk home without stumbling in the dark. That graceful decay of light was controlled by one of the dozens of computers in the car, diagnosis of which required the use and understanding of advanced diagnostic equipment which the auto-repairer did not have.
As a result the car owner had to be referred to an authorised dealer who had both the requisite diagnostic equipment and the trained technicians.
The contrast between this level of skill and education required to fix a modern day car and the commonplace apprenticeship-oriented barely literate or illiterate majority of Indian auto mechanics is glaring.
The manager of an auto repair shop in turn needs all this education and more; he needs additional education in how to select and procure diagnostic equipment as well as how to schedule the workload of trained auto diagnosticians and adjuster-repairers, how to cost for the service, how to ensure full utilisation of expensive diagnostic resources, and so on.
That the automobile population in India is growing at over ones million cars a year only means that the shortfall highlighted above will rapidly develop into a chasm if our education system is not changed.
The illustration above can be multiplied hundreds of times over if one looks at advances in textile machinery, household appliances, air-conditioning systems, building-automation-system driven lifts, fire prevention and suppression systems and lighting, television production equipment, reefer-trucking and other transportation systems, and so on.
Nothing that our education factories produce by way of millions of BAs, BComs and BScs can handle these needs of the economy as it changes with modern day equipment, which in turn changes with great rapidity as technology advances.
The problem is further aggravated by a distinct shift in the economy towards a services-driven one. We need logistics managers, entertainment managers, retail lending experts, home finance experts, multimodal transporters of perishable cargo, global tour operators, and so on.
To illustrate, one only needs to look at entertainment. Modern day event organisers have to deal with large amounts of high-tech equipment not just for sound reproduction but control of lighting, props, fireworks, animation, etc.
The same event manager also has to understand marketing, promotion and packaging as well as how to enhance ticket sales or audience participation. All in all this is a far cry from the dilettante who organised events in twentieth century India!
The need of the twenty-first century urban India is for professional training at a 10+3 level in the form of what one would appropriately call a PD or professional degree.
In some advanced countries this is called an AA or associate degree and is given at the 12+2 level. Although some current "diplomas" are also given at the 10+3 level, the use of the term "diploma" to cover MBAs at one end and skilled-labour at the other has completely devalued the term and made it ambiguous. Hence the new designation of PD for the new programme that has been proposed. Why 10+3, one may well ask.
The fact is that the urban masses consider "matriculation" or the 10th grade as the current ultimate in education for most of their children, seeing no value in spending more on their children, to produce arguably unemployable adults. The 10+3 programme would thus show them a clear path to a high income and easy employability for their children, so that they can move up the value chain from peon- like jobs or casual work.
PDs would be offered to the urban majority in lieu of current largely useless BAs, BComs and BScs and would address specific professions.
Instead of BAs we would have PDs in web-presence management, technical writing, writing for children, production and distribution of print publications, television script writing, and so on. Instead of BComs we would have PDs in information systems audit, forensic accounting, capital market operations, mortgage financing, etc. Instead of BScs we would have PDs in bio-informatics techniques, genetic diagnosis, clinical trial conduct, etc. The number of PDs that would need to be structured, runs into scores as the needs of modern day urban society are diverse and complex.
Moreover, these programmes need to be flexible to adopt to changing needs, instead of remaining monoliths like our BAs and BComs have. While some degree of certification would help in setting standards, too much regulation would stifle flexibility and creativity in design of programmes.
A balance is thus needed between the two. Needless to say, the much fewer youth with higher education in mind could continue to do BAs and BScs or BComs as they do now.
Education for PDs should be conducted in professional colleges combining faculty from current junior colleges and polytechnics, supplemented by adjunct faculty from the practices, and equipped with suitable laboratories, computers and training software.
Undoubtedly faculty will need retraining to focus them on professional skills and not mere fundamental concepts (which will still need to be taught at the first year level).
Additionally adjunct faculty from industry and business with the right professional experience will have to be inducted, on an ongoing and permanent basis, to provide the right mix of grounding in concepts and training in relevant skills making up the total educational mix.
Moreover, these professional colleges will have to team up with businesses to give their students the necessary internship exposures that they need, in between the three years, to make their graduates readily employable.
The introduction of professional degrees at the 10+3 level as proposed will both address the real needs of urban India in the balance of this century as well as avoid the creation of armies of unemployable but "educated" masses in our cities. It is an idea whose time has definitely come.
The author is a consultant in business strategy and lateral thinker.