There is something unsettling about an empty classroom. It is easy to see the vacant benches as a statistical problem: a shortfall in enrolment, an inefficient utilisation of public infrastructure, or evidence that young people are losing interest in higher education. But an empty classroom may be saying something more complicated. It may be telling us that the relationship between the student, the teacher, the institution and the idea of education itself is changing.Recent data place Jammu and Kashmir’s Gross Enrolment Ratio in higher education at around 21.5 per cent, considerably below the national figure of roughly 30 per cent. The numbers become even more striking when one looks at government degree colleges. The government has acknowledged that its colleges possess a sanctioned capacity of 116,767 seats, while admissions in the previous session stood at 45,438- leaving a substantial proportion of available capacity unused. The government has consequently indicated that there is no immediate need to establish new degree colleges and that the emphasis should instead be on making better use of existing institutions.

The obvious response is to ask: why are students not coming to college? But perhaps that is not quite the right question. The more difficult question is: what has happened to the meaning of the college in the imagination of the student?

I ask this question from within the institution. As a contractual lecturer in a government degree college in Jammu and Kashmir, I do not encounter higher education merely as an aggregate of enrolment ratios, sanctioned posts and administrative reports. I encounter it in the more prosaic circumstances in which institutions reveal themselves: in classrooms, corridors, conversations with students, attendance registers, questions that are asked and questions that remain unasked. There is a peculiar intimacy to observing an institution from inside. One begins to notice not only what the official statistics capture, but also what they cannot.

The first temptation is to conclude that students have become indifferent to education. I am not convinced. Young people in Jammu and Kashmir remain intensely invested in education. Families continue to spend considerable resources on professional courses, competitive examinations, technical education and degrees that appear to promise employment. The problem, therefore, may not be a disappearance of aspiration. It may be a reorientation of aspiration.

The conventional degree college is increasingly being asked to justify itself. A degree that once carried an almost self-evident promise of social mobility can no longer rely upon that promise. Students are more conscious of the distance between obtaining a qualification and securing a meaningful livelihood. They compare conventional degrees with professional programmes, specialised courses, universities outside Jammu and Kashmir, vocational pathways and an expanding digital ecosystem of knowledge and certification. The question confronting the student is increasingly blunt: What will this education allow me to become?

This is not necessarily a decline of educational values. It may represent a more demanding conception of value. The old social contract of higher education assumed that access itself was transformative. Establish a college, expand seats, provide teachers and curricula, and the institution would naturally attract students because the degree possessed an intrinsic social currency. That assumption is becoming less secure.We have expanded the physical architecture of higher education. We now have to ask whether we have expanded its intellectual and social imagination with equal seriousness. For a college can be physically accessible and yet intellectually distant.

It can have classrooms without creating a compelling classroom experience. It can have a syllabus without generating curiosity. It can have teachers........

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