The Great Abdication | How India's Educational Institutions Can (Probably, Hopefully) Be Fixed

1. A Promising Solution: The Universal Competency Assessment Model

The path toward reform may lie in implementing a comprehensive accountability system through mandatory competency examinations—a “GATE Lite” approach that could fundamentally reshape the educational landscape. This solution deserves serious consideration as it addresses the core dysfunction while creating powerful incentives for genuine improvement.

The mechanism would work as follows: Every engineering graduate would be required to take a standardized competency examination covering fundamental engineering principles—essentially a simplified version of the existing GATE exam. Crucially, this wouldn’t be a high-stakes entrance test but rather a baseline competency assessment that every graduate must attempt after completing their degree.

Here’s how this can be advantageous: Students would receive modest financial rewards based on their performance—perhaps 1,000-2,000 rupees for decent scores. This isn’t life-changing money, but it’s enough to ensure students won’t simply boycott the exam or deliberately perform poorly. Since they’ve already invested four years in their education and are sitting for the exam anyway, most would make a reasonable effort to score well for the small monetary incentive.

The real power lies in institutional accountability. Colleges whose graduates consistently perform poorly on these assessments would face closure. This creates a direct link between educational quality and institutional survival—something completely absent in the current system. Suddenly, colleges would have powerful incentives to actually teach rather than merely process students through degree mills.

The point of this approach would be is its simplicity and resistance to gaming. Unlike entrance examinations that can be manipulated through coaching, this system measures actual learning outcomes. Colleges cannot simply teach to the test because the syllabus is already their prescribed curriculum. They would be forced to genuinely improve their teaching quality to ensure their graduates can demonstrate basic competency.

Implementation would face predictable resistance—particularly from the thousands of substandard institutions that would face closure. However, the economic logic is compelling. Why should society continue subsidizing institutions that provide negative value? The short-term disruption of closing ineffective colleges would be vastly outweighed by the long-term benefits of concentrating resources on institutions that actually educate their students.

This system would also solve the information asymmetry problem plaguing students and employers. Prospective students could evaluate colleges based on their graduates’ competency scores, while employers would have reliable indicators of actual capability rather than meaningless degree certificates.

2. Implementation and Broader Implications

The universal competency assessment model represents more than educational reform—it’s a mechanism for restoring genuine meritocracy to Indian society. By making institutional performance transparent and consequential, this system would naturally concentrate educational resources on effective institutions while eliminating the parasitic elements that currently drain societal resources.

IT may be rightfully argued that closing thousands of colleges would create unemployment and social disruption. However, this perspective misses the crucial point: these institutions already fail to provide meaningful education or employment outcomes. Their closure would eliminate the elaborate fiction that wastes four years of students’ lives and their families’ resources while producing graduates unfit for productive employment.

The would logically also create powerful market incentives for innovation in education delivery. Institutions facing closure would be motivated to experiment with new teaching methods, hire competent faculty, and develop genuine expertise in their fields. The competitive pressure would drive educational innovation in ways that regulatory mandates have consistently failed to achieve.

Moreover, this approach aligns with broader economic necessities. As global competition intensifies and artificial intelligence automates routine tasks, India desperately needs engineers capable of genuine innovation and problem-solving. The current system produces exactly the opposite—graduates trained to memorize and regurgitate information without developing analytical capabilities.

The financial aspects deserve particular attention. Rather than continuing to subsidize thousands of worthless institutions, society could redirect resources toward fewer, higher-quality colleges that demonstrate actual educational outcomes. This concentration of resources would enable these institutions to compete globally rather than merely existing as local degree mills.

Conclusion: The Choice Before Us

We face a stark choice between comfortable delusion and uncomfortable truth. We can continue maintaining illusions about our educational achievements while our competitive position erodes, or we can confront the reality that we have constructed an elaborate system for manufacturing ignorance and begin the difficult work of reconstruction.

The underlying economic forces are inexorable. India cannot indefinitely sustain educational institutions that consume resources while producing negative value. The question is not whether change will come, but whether we will initiate it proactively or have it imposed upon us through competitive failure.

The educated-yet-ignorant graduate represents more than a product of our broken system—they embody our society’s choice of credentials over competence, appearance over substance, and comfortable delusions over difficult truths. Breaking free from this trap requires acknowledging that we have made fundamental errors in our approach to human capital development.

Only through such acknowledgment can we begin building educational institutions worthy of India’s aspirations and equal to the challenges of global competition. The alternative is continued decline disguised as progress, until external forces compel the reckoning we lack the courage to initiate ourselves.