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A certain university dean recently told me, with some disappointment, that his daughter had decided to join an AI startup immediately after completing her undergraduate degree instead of pursuing a Master’s to attain skills. His reaction was understandable. For generations of Indian academics and middle class families, education has followed a reassuring hierarchy. A Bachelor’s degree was good, a Master’s was better, and a doctorate represented the highest form of intellectual accomplishment. More years spent studying generally meant better prospects and greater professional security.
As someone currently navigating a doctoral programme myself, I found myself looking at the daughter’s decision differently. Perhaps she was not walking away from education at all. Perhaps she had simply recognised something our universities have been slower to acknowledge — in parts of the emerging economy, another degree is no longer automatically the most valuable next step.
India has spent decades trying, rightly, to expand access to higher education. The Gross Enrolment Ratio for the 18 to 23 age group reached 29.5 in 2022-23, compared with 23.7 in 2014-15. That is an achievement. But expanding access raises another question: what exactly are students gaining access to?
The problem is not that India has too many educated young people. It is that the relationship between qualification, competence and employment is becoming increasingly uncertain. The Economic Survey 2024-25 offers a revealing picture. Among workers with graduate degrees, 38.23 per cent were in occupations requiring specialised skills, while 50.3 per cent were in semi-skilled occupations. Possessing a degree and finding work that actually uses the level of skill associated with it are not necessarily the same thing.
Artificial intelligence makes this mismatch more urgent. Generative AI can already perform some routine cognitive work around which white-collar employment has traditionally been organised, from summarising documents and producing standard reports to elementary coding and procedural analysis. The Economic Survey 2025-26 acknowledges this shift and argues that education will increasingly need to cultivate reasoning, problem solving, communication and adaptability.
Yet much of our educational culture continues to follow an older sequence: accumulate knowledge, reproduce it in an examination, acquire the qualification and enter the labour market. AI unsettles that sequence because access to information is no longer scarce. The ability to reproduce information becomes less valuable when compared with the ability to interrogate it, connect it to a problem, recognise when it is wrong and use it intelligently.
This does not make the university obsolete. The qualities universities can cultivate at their best, including critical thinking, disciplinary depth, intellectual curiosity and ethical reasoning, become more important when machines can generate plausible answers within seconds. Turning universities into coding academies would be a poor response to AI. But pretending disciplinary knowledge alone will be sufficient would be an equally serious mistake.
An economics student should understand economic theory while knowing how contemporary tools can interrogate a dataset. A journalism student should understand reporting and ethics, but also how algorithms shape information and synthetic media complicates verification. A literature student need not become a programmer, but should understand how generative systems are changing authorship, publishing and intellectual property. These need not remain extracurricular skills acquired through separate online courses.
India already has some architecture for this flexibility. The Academic Bank of Credits facilitates credit accumulation and transfer, while UGC provisions allow credits earned through platforms such as SWAYAM and NPTEL to be considered for accumulation and transfer. The principle is already established: learning need not remain confined within a single classroom or rigid disciplinary pathway.
Universities can now make that flexibility meaningful by allowing students to combine core disciplines with rigorously assessed modules responsive to technological and professional change. A mass communication student, for instance, could study media theory alongside data visualisation, computational research or AI-assisted verification. The aim is not to replace degrees with certificates, but to ensure that degrees remain connected to the world into which students graduate.
The harder reform concerns institutional culture. Academic safeguards are necessary because curricula cannot be rewritten whenever a new technology becomes fashionable. But academic rigour cannot become an excuse for inertia. Departments need room to introduce electives, short modules and practitioner collaborations while preserving the intellectual foundations of their disciplines.
There is also a cultural question. Indian families have long imagined educational progression as a ladder on which stopping can feel like falling behind. Bachelor’s, Master’s, doctorate: each additional qualification appears to promise greater security. Advanced study will remain indispensable for many professions, but it need not be the automatic next step for every graduate.
The Economic Survey 2025-26 itself argues for a more fluid relationship between education and employment, including earn-and-learn pathways, recognition of short-form credentials and movement between education and work. This may prove particularly important when skills can change faster than conventional educational cycles.
The Dean’s daughter may therefore represent something larger than one family’s disagreement over a Master’s degree. She belongs to a generation for whom education may cease to mean the uninterrupted accumulation of qualifications. A young person might graduate, work, return for specialised study, acquire another skill and later return to education again.
India should not respond by diminishing the university or declaring the degree irrelevant. It should do something harder: make the degree valuable enough that students seek higher education for what a university can uniquely give them, rather than because another qualification has become the price of entering the employment queue.
In the AI economy, the question will no longer be simply how many degrees a young Indian possesses. It will be what, after acquiring them, she can actually understand, question and do.
Rana is a Gurgaon-based writer and research scholar at MDU, Rohtak
