Engineering graduates struggle: Can colleges fix the skills gap?

India's engineering education system is producing millions of graduates but with a glaring employability gap where only 43 percent of them find employment. Conventional teaching practices based on old curricula and theory do not provide students with employable skills. The solution to this lies in behavioural sciencesmoving focus from what students should "know" to what they should become habitual about.

Promoting everyday coding practice, experiential learning, and redefining evaluations can fuel effective skill development. With technology transforming at lightning speed, colleges need to evolve, rethink policy, and design an environment where students are actively creating, experimenting, and inventing.

Arindam Mukherjee, Co-founder and CEO at NextLeap, points out that colleges need to reimagine education by prioritizing behavioural science and experiential skill-building

AICTE statistics for the years 2019-20 to 2022-23 suggest that there were 6.01 million students studying at the diploma, undergraduate and postgraduate levels of engineering courses but only 2.64 Million (~43 percent) were placed in employment.

SO, HOW DID WE

Ask any individual and you will be directed towards causes such as an outdated syllabus, a lack of an industry taxonomy of skills, no industry exposure for the instructors and so on.

However, if you delve deeper into the matter, the cause could also be an understanding of the science of behaviour.

Learning isn't the product of teaching, but rather the product of the learner's activity. That implies that for a learning experience to be effective, it must have the ability to lead to some desired behaviours among students. A recent paper by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania, detailed which interventions do (and don't) work in changing behaviour.

What they discovered is that theoretical knowledge sharing in class, i.e., knowledge-based interventions, has a very small effect on changing behaviors. However, behavior skills training and habit formation, i.e., providing highly selected learning materials and the opportunity to practice them, have the greatest impact in terms of changing behaviors.

So, how do we change our mindset to go from "what should the student KNOW" to "what is the habit we want our students to develop"? The question we need to be asking ourselves isn't "How do we make sure our students know about arrays" - it is "How do we make sure our students code for an hour a day".

This will make the colleges rethink all the parameters of the educational system. Do the professors teach the material or serve as a guide or mentor? Do the tests come in the form of a quiz/test or a demo day when students share their work? How do we create an environment where the students "want" to learn? Solutions to these questions could remake how colleges are run nowadays.

HOW DO WE ARRIVE AT THIS NEEDED STATE?

The response once more lies in behavioural science. The research paper also cites the fact that interventions at the structural and policy levels are more effective in bringing about changes in behaviour. There must be a rethink on the education policy side regarding the efficacy of college education and the transformations needed.

This is all the more critical in the modern age, since the half-life of technology skills is diminishing day by day and unless there is a total rethink on collegiate education, academia can never keep pace with the changing events in the world of technology.

For India to accrue gains from its demographic dividend, it needs a skilled workforce and the colleges have a huge responsibility to create a skilled talent economy. The question is, is the Indian college system prepared?