WHAT’S THE VALUE OF MY ACADEMIC DEGREE?

ISN’T IT JUST A PIECE OF PAPER!

Recently my friend shared her experience with me, which is worth sharing with everyone out there.

Which is a phone call conversation speaker being my friend (Assistant Professor in a Private college) follows;

Listen Shruti, don’t you think there is something very wrong with our education system? 

What happened? (I asked her)

College allotted me a task during lockdown, where I had to make phone calls to the 12th class and graduate students belonging to commerce and management background to take admission in our college and pursue M.com or MBA. I received a mail from the college having 7 attachments, one of which contained the list of some 1,100 students with their name, field and phone number.

I was supposed to make 70-100 calls each day to convince students to take admission in my college. There were also students in the list who were neither from commerce background nor from management. Earlier I was taking it as unproductive task that college assigned to me which has nothing to do with academics but later I thought I would never get chance to talk to so many students. So I filled myself with optimism and whenever someone picks the calls and tell me he/she is not interested to pursue M.com but MBA, I asked each of them the reason for the same. 

One day I made call and on the other side was a student pursing last semester of B.Sc agriculture, he was curious to investigate more about MBA program. At first I thought, what if this student is just passing time during this lockdown period but later he told me that he had already visited the website of the college to know about the MBA.

My own curiosity increased to the peak to know why this boy and the majority of the students I am contacting are interested in MBA. I asked him “why MBA”? He told me, “this is the only stream available to him which can pay him his father’s money back which he has invested in me so far”.

I asked him, do you know, “what does MBA teaches”?

“No ma’am, I don’t know” he replied. I, absentmindedly told him everything about MBA course. 

In the evening, I was sitting in my room thinking of how our education system has actually murdered to value the academic degrees and practice of learning things by heart. There were times when having a graduate degree meant so much to students and society but now even a Ph.D holder stand in the line of getting selected as a government peon. This is the ground reality which is forcing the youth of our country to migrate to foreign countries. 

Why can’t there be equal demand and supply of students and the jobs? Every child of this country has the right to get education but no government has the right to treat the degrees of students as a sheet of paper. What is the need of opening so many private and public schools and colleges when they cannot make students independent at the end? Should we think it as a trap that every college and university is placing before students? 

Until and unless, the demand and supply is not solved, India will keep losing a precious gem every minute.