Has a college degree become an entry ticket instead of a guarantee?

A degree still carries value, but it no longer guarantees the job outcome earlier generations may have expected. In today's 'YOUR INDIA' column, Santosh Nair writes about credential inflation, overqualification and the widening gap between educational attainment and secure employment in India.

In Uttar Pradesh, the state government once advertised sixty-two vacancies for the post of peon, a job requiring nothing more than a fifth-standard education, mostly involving running errands and carrying files between offices.

Over ninety-three thousand people applied. Among them were nearly 3,700 holders of a PhD, along with roughly 28,000 people holding postgraduate degrees.

Read more: The missing bridge between college and a first job in India

Read that again. Doctors of philosophy, people who had spent years researching a single specialised subject, competing for a job that formally required them to be able to read and write at a basic level.

This is not a story about those applicants being foolish, or about the job itself. It is a story about what a degree in India has quietly come to mean, and what it no longer reliably guarantees.

When does a degree stop being a guarantee?

For decades, a degree functioned as a kind of promise. Study hard, earn the certificate, and a stable, respectable job would generally follow. That promise........

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