I stand on the balcony of our first-floor flat every morning and stare at a humongous billboard: an advertisement for a large private university on the city’s outskirts that states, “Earn Job-Ready Degrees at ***** University.” The main hook of this ad campaign is that the university would provide students with degrees that will guarantee jobs.
In the last few decades “job-readiness” or “work-readiness” have become the catchphrases of the education industry–not only in India but across the globe. Just a simple google search would validate what I am trying to say. The web is filled to the brim with articles and explanations on what job readiness means—some content sensible while some outright salesy.
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I have a sort of Déjà vu each time I see such marketing. A few years ago, nobody spoke of “job-readiness” because the sophisticated catchphrase didn’t much exist but colleges in India spoke heavily about job placements (which implied practically the same thing) and that became the prime force behind the proliferation of thousands of private engineering and management colleges across the country. Young adults prepared for engineering exams in large numbers—massively fuelling the coaching factories, putting increased pressure on students, many of whom were being forced to be engineers or doctors to make their parents happy. Why else would parents invest in their education if it didn’t promise a job?
I understand “job-readiness” may mean different things to different people but this “let’s get you an education so you have a job” attitude, per me, is a fatal thing to the very idea of education.
Isn’t education supposed to open one’s mind to a world of knowledge and possibilities?
Isn’t education by itself often enough to make you what the job-market needs: a sincere, collaborative, understanding, empathetic, industrious, and perceptive individual?
The world sure doesn’t need automatons but humans that are willing to learn, upskill whenever required, and solve problems—forging the path ahead for themselves and their peers.
Moreover, why do we think pursuing education for education’s sake will reap negative results in the job market? I know many Humanities grads who are successful entrepreneurs. There are numerous people with successful careers who studied whatever the hell they wished to without ever equating the degree they earned to their job prospects. And countless must be people who enrolled in job-ready programs—only to emerge failures in the job market, often because they realized it too late that only pursuing a job-ready degree won’t bequeath upon them a glorious career.
It may be slightly hard to believe (given the aggressive rat-racy environment we are in) to see that we are surrounded by many successful people whose education wasn’t directly a means to the jobs they got. Also, there has to be some room for the evolving nature of human interest and inclinations.
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YouTube’s CEO, Susan Diane Wojcicki, for instance, studied Literature and History at Harvard in 1990, and Economics at the University of California in 1993—eventually earning an MBA at the University of California in 1998. Does her story imply she didn’t know herself at all when she pursued literature? Or did someone lure her into “job-readiness” then? Wojcicki quite clearly let her interests and inclinations flow—which exactly is the primary purpose of any kind of formal or informal education.
Steve Jobs, considered one of the greatest tech gurus, dabbled in various disciplines ranging from literature, philosophy, physics, design, and Buddhism without ever earning a degree in any.
Likewise, creative fields such as fiction-writing and film-making are filled with engineers and doctors. Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan-born American author of bestselling novels, A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Kite Runner, and And the Mountains Echoed, is a physician by education. If Hosseini didn’t let his creative juices flow and thought himself done after he finished his medical degree and found work as a physician, we would be deprived of the poignant appeal of his stories that transport us to the mystical world of Afghanistan—of the humanity and beauty of its varied peoples.
I can go on giving more examples but I feel my rant is done for today. It would make sense to conclude it with a quote by someone with more credibility than ‘yours truly.’
“The highest education is that which does not merely give us information but makes our life in harmony with all existence.”—Rabindranath Tagore
Ambika Singh,PhD 