The Smart Money Has Already Voted on Indian Education — And It Is Betting Against the Degree

A strange week in Indian education

Pay attention to where money goes when nobody is performing for an audience. Money does not post on LinkedIn. Money does not give convocation speeches. Money simply moves — quietly, rationally, toward the best available return — and in doing so it tells you what a thousand policy documents will not.

In the span of a single recent year, I watched three separate signals arrive from three completely different corners of the Indian economy. Individually, each was a headline. Together, they were something far more unsettling: a verdict.

The first signal came from a father I will call Ramesh — not his real name, but a real man, the kind of parent who walks into consultations like ours every week. He had just signed an education loan at eleven percent interest to fund his son's seat at a private engineering college near Kanpur. Total commitment across four years, once you count fees, hostel, coaching arrears, a laptop and the son's foregone income: north of ₹18 lakh. When I gently asked what starting salary the family was expecting, Ramesh said, with total sincerity, "Package will come. Engineering hai." Engineering, after all. The median starting salary for a non-premier private engineering graduate in India today is ₹3.2–4.5 lakh per annum. At that salary, servicing that loan, it will take his family the better part of two decades simply to break even. Not to profit. To break even.

The second signal came from a man who manages other people's money for a living, and manages it well. Saurabh Mukherjea, founder of Marcellus Investment Managers, went on record telling Indian parents something close to heresy: "You are better off in India not going to university." He called our education a machine for "ratta maaro and regurgitate in the exam." He argued that a Class 12 pass-out can now out-earn many graduates, and pointed to the uncomfortable inversion in the data — graduate unemployment running near 30% while unemployment among Indians who cannot read or write sits near 3%. He blamed, among other things, an "insidious" colonial legacy of degree worship that Indian parents have never shaken off.

The third signal came from a boardroom, not a bank branch or a broadcast studio. KKR — one of the largest private-equity firms on earth — through its portfolio company Lighthouse Learning, agreed to acquire Pathways School in Gurugram for a reported ₹1,500 crore. One school. Ten acres. Around 1,600 students paying roughly ₹10 lakh a year. The deal was struck at about 13 times the school's annual operating profit — the kind of multiple you pay when you are very confident the cash flows will keep growing. This is the same investor class that owns infrastructure, insurance, and technology at global scale. And it has decided that in India, one of the safest long-term bets available is the premium private schooling that affluent families use to get their children out of the mainstream system.

A striving middle-class father. A billionaire-whisperer fund manager. A New York private-equity titan. They share no WhatsApp group. They will never sit at the same table. And yet, read together, their choices spell out a single sentence that should keep every vice-chancellor, every education secretary, and every parent in this country awake at night:

We have built an education system that the people who understand it best are increasingly refusing to use.

I want to be very precise about what I am — and am not — saying. I run UniGo Education. My work, every single day, is helping Indian students study abroad. You might therefore expect me to celebrate all of this as good for business. I do not. Because the deeper I go into the data, the clearer it becomes that "send your child abroad" is a rational decision for an individual family and a catastrophic strategy for a nation of 1.46 billion people. You cannot airlift your way to a developed economy. The exit door is real, but it is narrow, and it is expensive, and 90% of Indian students will never walk through it.

So this essay is not a sales pitch for leaving. It is a provocation aimed squarely at making staying worth it.

Much of the hard evidence I will draw on comes from a serious new piece of work: a 118-page flagship report titled Fixing India's Education–Employment Disconnect, published in 2026 by the independent think tank ZÉRO (an initiative founded by Raunaq Jain). It is the most honest audit of this problem I have read, and I will quote it liberally. But the argument, the interpretation, and the discomfort I am about to cause are entirely my own.

Let us follow the money.

Three Exits of Capital

Exit One: The households are leaving with their savings

Start with the largest and least understood capital flight in modern India — and it is not happening on any stock exchange. It is happening at kitchen tables.

In 2024, Indian households spent an estimated USD 44 billion on overseas education. Read that number slowly. Forty-four billion dollars — roughly ₹3.7 lakh crore — in a single year, deployed by Indian families into foreign universities, foreign cities, foreign economies. Industry projections suggest that figure could reach USD 91 billion by 2030, with the number of Indian students abroad crossing 2.5 million. Education loans for overseas study alone touched ₹23,576 crore in 2023–24.

Now hold that against the other direction of the flow. According to the All India Survey on Higher Education, India — a country of 1.46 billion people and 43.3 million enrolled students — hosted just 46,878 foreign students from the rest of the world. The arithmetic is brutal:

India sends nearly twenty times more students out than it attracts in.

We are not running a higher-education system. We are running a higher-education trade deficit — and it is one of the most lopsided in the world.

Here is what makes this an exit rather than mere ambition. When a family in Ludhiana or Hyderabad or Kochi liquidates a fixed deposit, mortgages a plot, and takes on ₹40 lakh of debt to send a child to Canada, Australia, the UK, Germany or the US, that family is not primarily buying a chemistry syllabus. As the ZÉRO report puts it, they are buying "global career insurance." They are buying a legal pathway from student visa to work permit to permanent residency. They are buying distance from a domestic labour market they have quietly concluded will not reward their child fairly. Every one of those ₹3.7 lakh crore is a vote — and every vote is a vote of no confidence.

And now the part that should genuinely disturb every policymaker reading this. The report identifies a mechanism so perverse it is almost elegant:

"The families most capable of demanding quality reform from Indian institutions are often the first to opt out of them. Their exit reduces market pressure for domestic improvement."

Think about who leaves. It is disproportionately the informed, the affluent, the connected — precisely the families with the social capital to write to a vice-chancellor, to sit on a governing board, to make noise in the press, to demand better. In any functioning market, these are the loud customers whose complaints force improvement. But in Indian education, the loud customers do not complain. They leave. They buy their way out. And their departure removes exactly the pressure that might have forced the system to improve for the millions left behind. The exit of the few guarantees the stagnation of the many. This is not a side effect. It is the engine.

So when we celebrate that "Indian students are conquering the world's best universities," we should sit with the uncomfortable flip side of that pride: our brightest and best-resourced young people, and the taxpayer subsidies embedded in the ones who trained at IITs and AIIMS before leaving, are increasingly a net export. We are, in effect, running one of the most sophisticated talent-and-capital giveaway programmes in economic history — and calling it aspiration.

The Education Trade Deficit

Exit Two: The intellectuals are telling you to skip it

The second exit is quieter but, in some ways, more radical — because it comes not from families acting on instinct, but from analysts acting on data. And when Saurabh Mukherjea said out loud that young Indians are "better off not going to university," the interesting thing was not the outrage. It was how many parents privately admitted he had a point.

The core of the argument is an inversion that should be impossible in a healthy economy. In every developed nation, more education means less unemployment. In India, the relationship has flipped. The International Labour Organisation's data shows graduate unemployment at roughly 29% — nearly nine times the 3.4% rate for Indians who cannot read or write. The State of Working India 2026 report sharpens the knife: graduate unemployment among those aged 15–25 runs near 40%. The India Employment Report 2024 found that educated youth made up 65.7% of all unemployed young Indians in 2022.

Sit with the full absurdity of that. We have built a system in which acquiring a degree can increase your near-term odds of being unemployed. A young person who spent three years and several lakh rupees earning a BA or a B.Tech is, in that critical early window, statistically more likely to be jobless than a peer who never entered a college gate. Mukherjea's blunt conclusion — that a Class 12 pass-out who starts working or building a skill can out-earn a graduate — is not contrarian noise. In a distressingly large number of cases, it is just true.

He is also right about the why. The ZÉRO report's language is more measured but the diagnosis is identical: an education culture that "rewards recall over reasoning," producing graduates who "perform on paper but struggle in real workplace contexts." When 64% of IT hiring managers report that fresh graduates need three to six months of retraining before they can do the job they were supposedly educated for, the degree has stopped certifying capability. It now certifies little more than the ability to have survived the degree.

But here is where I part ways with the fund manager — and where a diagnosis, however accurate, becomes dangerous if you stop there. "Don't go to university" is advice that only works for people who have an alternative. Mukherjea's audience have alternatives in abundance. But zoom out to the 34% of Indian undergraduates studying Arts and Humanities, the first-generation learner in a Tier-3 college in Bihar, the daughter whose family finally saved enough to send one child to college. For them, "just skip university" is not liberation. It is abandonment dressed up as wisdom. The degree may be a broken promise, but for tens of millions of Indians it remains the only promise on offer — the single institutional pathway that might, just might, pull a family up a rung.

So the intellectuals' exit reveals something true and something incomplete at once. True: the degree, as currently built, is failing on its own terms. Incomplete: the answer cannot be to tell an entire generation to walk away from the one ladder they have. The answer is to fix the ladder.

The Inversion

Exit Three: The institutional capital is building escape hatches for the rich

The third exit is the one almost nobody is talking about, and it may be the most revealing of all — because private equity does not have feelings, ideology, or nostalgia. It has spreadsheets. And when the coldest, most analytical capital on the planet decides to pour money into a corner of Indian education, you should ask exactly which corner, and why.

KKR's move, through Lighthouse Learning, to buy Pathways School Gurugram for around ₹1,500 crore was described as one of the largest deals in India's K–12 sector. Lighthouse — formerly EuroKids International — had already acquired Heritage Xperiential in Gurugram in 2023. This is a deliberate, well-funded strategy to assemble a portfolio of premium Indian schools: International Baccalaureate campuses, ₹10-lakh-a-year fees, the kind of institution whose entire value proposition is that it is not the mainstream Indian system.

Notice what the smart institutional money is and is not buying. It is not building affordable colleges to serve the 19 million students the ZÉRO report identifies as at risk of graduating without employable skills. It is not investing in the 51,900-plus Tier-2 and Tier-3 institutions where the vast majority of Indians actually study. It is buying the escape hatches — the elite pods where the top 1% of families purchase a globally portable education that routes their children around the domestic system entirely.

Private equity has, in other words, independently arrived at the same thesis as the anxious parent and the outspoken fund manager: the future value in Indian education lies in helping people escape the average of it. A 13x earnings multiple is a bet that affluent families will pay more and more, year after year, to opt their children out — a bet against the mainstream system improving fast enough to make the escape unnecessary.

And this is how you get the defining feature of Indian education in 2026 — what the ZÉRO report calls "the two-tier reality." Two real graduates, because no statistic lands like two human beings side by side:

Arjun graduated from IIT Bombay in Computer Science in 2024. Before he had even finished his degree, he was holding international offers worth around USD 200,000. His family's total investment in one of the most heavily subsidised elite educations on earth: roughly ₹8–10 lakh.

Rahul graduated the same year, in the same subject, from an AKTU-affiliated private college in Kanpur. After months of waiting, he accepted a software-testing role paying ₹3.2 lakh per annum. His family's investment: about ₹8 lakh, part of it a ₹4 lakh loan at 11%.

Same country. Same year. Same degree, on paper. One walks into a six-figure-dollar global career. The other walks into a decade of debt for a job that barely clears ₹27,000 a month.

This is not a talent gap. It is an institutional opportunity gap.

Arjun and Rahul were very likely equally capable eighteen-year-olds. What separated their outcomes was not ability. It was which tier of a two-tier system they happened to land in — and that, increasingly, is decided by how much capital a family can deploy. The smart money has concluded, correctly, that the winning move is to make sure your child is always an Arjun. What the smart money cannot do — what no amount of private capital will ever do — is make the system produce fewer Rahuls. Only reform can do that.

The Two Tier Reality

The number nobody in the system wants to sit with

Most Indian families dramatically underestimate what a degree actually costs, because they think only about tuition. But the true cost is tuition plus living expenses plus coaching plus devices plus financing cost plus the invisible giant — opportunity cost, the income a young person forgoes by not working for three or four years. Add it all up honestly and a private engineering degree in India costs a family ₹12–26 lakh. At a metro or premier institution, ₹20–35 lakh and beyond.

Now set that investment against the return. For the graduate of an average private engineering college, the ZÉRO report's scenario is merciless: a typical starting salary of ₹3.2–4.5 lakh per annum, take-home pay of roughly ₹22,000–35,000 a month, and — after servicing an education loan — a time to recover the total investment of 7 to 15 years, often much longer.

A separate 2026 analysis by 1Finance put it even more starkly: at an average starting salary of around ₹4.74 lakh, it can take a family more than twenty years just to recover the cost of the degree — not to earn a return, simply to break even. Contrast that with an IIT graduate, whose subsidised education breaks even in 8 to 18 months and can generate a lifetime earnings premium of ₹4–8 crore. Same word — "engineer." Two entirely different financial universes.

This is why I call it what the report calls it: not an education problem, but a household capital-allocation crisis. An Indian family can invest the identical ₹10–25 lakh and achieve a twelve-month payback at one institution or a decade of quiet financial suffering at another — and, critically, they have almost no reliable way to tell the two apart before they pay. Placement data is self-reported and routinely inflated. There is no national registry linking colleges to the verified employment outcomes of their graduates. Families are making one of the three largest financial decisions of their lives — rivalling a house and a wedding — completely blind.

And for the poorest families who borrow to play this game, it is worse than blind. A household earning ₹3–5 lakh a year takes a ₹5–7 lakh loan at 10–11% so a child can attend a non-premier college, and that child graduates into a ₹3–4 lakh job. The loan repayment alone eats 40–50% of take-home pay. The report calls this "the modal experience of India's middle-tier graduate economy." I call it a debt trap wrapped in the language of aspiration and sold to the people who can least afford to lose.

But the cruellest cost is not measured in rupees at all. Behind the ROI tables is a mental-health emergency we have normalised to the point of silence. The National Crime Records Bureau recorded 13,044 student suicides in 2022 — nearly 8% of all suicides in the country that year. Between 2018 and 2023, more than a hundred students died by suicide inside our most elite institutions — the IITs and AIIMS — the very places we hold up as the system working. The Supreme Court of India was moved to constitute a national task force on student suicides in 2025. When the highest court in the land has to intervene in your education system's human cost, "we are working on reforms" is no longer an acceptable sentence.

So when the households flee, when the fund managers scoff, when the private equity builds escape hatches — understand that they are not being cynical. They are responding, rationally, to a machine that too often takes a family's savings and a child's mental health and returns a job that does not justify either.

The ROI Reckoning

Now let me tell you why the smart money is dangerously wrong

Everything I have written so far builds the case for the exits. Here is where I turn on it — because if you take only the first half of this essay, you will draw exactly the wrong conclusion, and it is the conclusion that is quietly hollowing out this country.

The exits are individually rational and collectively suicidal. Every family that leaves is making a sound decision for its own child. But a nation cannot exit itself. There is no foreign university large enough, no visa regime generous enough, no private-equity portfolio deep enough to absorb the 10 to 12 million young Indians who enter the labour force every single year. The exit door fits perhaps 5–8 lakh students a year. We produce over one crore graduates annually. For roughly 95% of Indian young people, there is no abroad. There is only the system we actually have — and if the informed, the wealthy, and the analytical have all stopped fighting to improve it, then we have quietly agreed to let the future of 95% of our children be decided by an institution their own elite refuses to trust.

That is the real crisis. Not that the degree is broken — broken things can be fixed. The crisis is that we are losing the political will to fix it, because everyone with the power to force change has purchased a personal way out.

And the stakes are not abstract. India's demographic dividend is projected to peak around 2041. Every year we delay, the ZÉRO report estimates, we forgo staggering value: if just 10 million graduates are working below their potential by ₹3–4 lakh each, the annual opportunity cost exceeds ₹3 lakh crore — nearly 1% of GDP. We are not just failing students. We are quietly amputating the country's own future output. A talent economy is being asked to run on a credential economy's operating system.

So no — the answer is not to agree with the smart money and abandon ship. The answer is to be honest about why the ship is sinking, and then to do the deeply unglamorous work of fixing the hull.

The uncomfortable truth: the system is not failing. It is working exactly as designed.

Here is the sentence that took me the longest to accept: nobody in Indian education is behaving irrationally. There is no villain. That is precisely what makes it so hard to fix. We love a good villain — the greedy private college, the lazy professor, the callous employer, the asleep-at-the-wheel regulator. But every single actor is behaving rationally given the incentives they actually face. The tragedy is structural, not moral. Consider the machine, actor by actor:

Private colleges optimise for seat occupancy, because revenue is enrolment times fees and there is no penalty for poor placement — the 2025 NAAC integrity concerns showed how valuable a mere grade had become, detached from jobs. State universities expand enrolment, because funding rewards scale, not employment. Faculty optimise for publications, because promotion rewards countable citations over teaching. Large employers concentrate hiring at 50 to 100 elite campuses and underinvest in freshers, because any talent they train can be poached. Students and families accumulate degrees and chase competitive exams, because credentials open doors more reliably than verified skills. And regulators measure inputs and compliance, because that is what their mandate has always rewarded — not verified employment outcomes.

Read that list again. Not one of those actors is stupid or evil. Each is making the smart local choice. And the sum of all those smart local choices is a system that produces 40% youth-graduate unemployment, an 8–9 lakh annual surplus of engineers with no engineering jobs, and 18,000 vacant PG medical seats in a country desperate for doctors. We built a machine superbly optimised to produce everything except the one thing it exists for: employable, thriving graduates.

This is why piecemeal fixes fail. You cannot fix a system of aligned incentives by lecturing one actor about morality. If you tell colleges to care about placements while still paying them for seats, nothing changes. The signals have to change simultaneously — and they must start with the one intervention that unlocks all the others: outcome transparency.

Notice what every one of those rational failures has in common. The college inflates placements because no one can verify them. The family chases prestige because no one publishes real outcomes. The dysfunction rests on a foundation of missing information. India meticulously measures its institutions. India separately measures its jobs — through the EPFO, the National Career Service, tax records. What India has never done is connect the two. That gap — the absence of a national, verified, public link between where you studied and whether you got a relevant job — sits at the exact centre of the disconnect. Fix that, and every other reform becomes possible. Leave it, and every other reform is built on sand.

The labour market already changed. The classroom didn't get the memo.

The floor of employability is rising every year, and the syllabus is standing still. NASSCOM estimates that AI will automate 30–40% of entry-level IT tasks by 2028 — the very rung that absorbed millions of Indian engineering graduates. Simultaneously, new demand is exploding where the university has barely looked: India's green economy could generate 7.29 million jobs by FY2028; the gig workforce is projected to hit 23.5 million by 2030; the Global Capability Centre ecosystem has already grown to 2,100-plus centres employing 2.4 million professionals. These are not science-fiction futures. They are hiring now. And the average Indian college is preparing students for an economy that no longer exists, using methods designed for an economy that existed before that.

We already know how to fix this. That is the most damning part.

If India lacked a solution, this essay would be a lament. But we are not short of answers. We are short of will. The design space has already been explored, tested, and proven — just not here, and not yet at scale. Germany runs a dual vocational system where students split time between classroom and paid employer training, with over a million active apprenticeship contracts a year and youth unemployment among the lowest in the OECD. Singapore's SkillsFuture updates its skills frameworks jointly with employers within months of an industry shifting. South Korea's LINC+ funds universities on industry collaboration and graduate employment — not prestige — and turned 100-plus universities into regional economic engines. Israel's universities treat research as an economic asset, rewarding faculty for building things the market wants. And the United States embeds paid, credit-bearing co-ops directly inside degrees, so students graduate with real employer references.

The structural insight underneath all of them is beautiful in its simplicity:

"High-performing systems do not debate whether education should lead to employment. They design the system so that employment becomes a natural outcome of education."

India does not need to invent this. We need to adapt it — at Indian scale, with Indian accountability. If I had to compress the entire reform agenda into the moves that would change the most: build a National Graduate Outcomes Registry cross-referenced with EPFO data, and publish a public Family ROI Dashboard so a parent can compare colleges on real salary and employability before signing the loan. Link accreditation and public funding to graduate employment, the way South Korea does. Make real, credit-bearing internships a graduation requirement, backed by a portable National Skills Passport that shifts hiring from pedigree to demonstrated competence. Launch a skills-first hiring movement to break the pedigree filter that locks out 90% of graduates. And serve the majority — the 24-lakh-a-year Arts and Humanities stream, the first-generation Tier-3 learner — not just the elite. None of this requires a law we do not have. NEP 2020 already points the right way; the problem is not the map, it is the walking. India does not need another policy framework. It needs the frameworks it already has to move from announcement to execution.

So here is my provocation — to each of you

I promised discomfort, and a diagnosis without a demand is just commentary. So let me address each of you directly, because this problem will only move if enough people refuse to look away.

To parents: Stop asking "which college has a good name?" and start demanding "which college can prove its graduates got relevant jobs?" You verify a used car's history before you buy it. You check a mutual fund's returns before you invest. Yet you commit ₹20 lakh to a college on the strength of a glossy brochure and a cousin's word. Your refusal to demand verified outcomes is not politeness. It is fuel for the machine. Become the loud customer who stays and complains, not the quiet one who pays and leaves.

To students: The degree is necessary but it is no longer sufficient. Chase capability, not just the certificate. One real internship, one shipped project, one demonstrable skill will do more for your career than three years of memorising past papers. The system was built to reward recall. Refuse to be recalled. Build something.

To vice-chancellors and educators: You know exactly which of your placement numbers are real and which are theatre. The question is whether you will be the leaders who chose to publish honest outcomes before you were forced to — or the ones who defended the theatre until it collapsed.

To regulators and government: You are measuring the wrong things with impressive rigour. Every input you audit — infrastructure, staffing ratios, documentation — is a proxy for the one thing you refuse to measure: did the graduate get a job? Build the Outcomes Registry. Link funding to employment. You have the EPFO data already sitting in a government server. The only thing missing is the will to connect it.

To employers: Your addiction to the same 50 campuses is not efficiency — it is laziness with a spreadsheet. Every time you filter by pedigree, you tell 90% of India's graduates that their capability is irrelevant because of their postcode. You are complaining about a talent shortage you are actively manufacturing. Hire for skills. Build the apprenticeships. The talent is there; you have simply decided not to look for it.

To the think tanks, the policy community, and yes, the fund managers: Mr. Mukherjea, you are right about the disease. But telling a generation to walk away from the only ladder most of them have is not a cure — it is an evacuation plan for the people who already own helicopters. The harder, less viral, more important work is to fix the ladder for the people standing on it.

Where UniGo Education actually stands

Let me close by being straight with you about my own position, because I would be a hypocrite not to.

I run a company that helps Indian students go abroad. Business, frankly, has never been better — and every trend in this essay points to it getting better still. If I were optimising purely for UniGo Education's revenue, my message would be simple: the Indian system is broken, so join the exodus, and let us book your flight.

I refuse to send that message, because it is bad for the country and, ultimately, dishonest about the problem.

Here is what we actually believe. Studying abroad should be a choice — a genuine pursuit of a specific opportunity, a world-class lab, a global network. It should not be an escape — a desperate flight from a domestic system that failed to offer a fair return. Today, for too many families, it is the second thing wearing the mask of the first. And the day India builds a higher-education system its own most informed citizens are proud to use, our business will change — and I will consider that the best possible outcome, because it will mean my country finally kept its promise to its young people.

Until that day, we do two things at once, without contradiction. We help the students in front of us find the best possible opportunity, in India or abroad, with total honesty about the ROI of each path. And we use whatever platform we have — including essays like this one — to argue, loudly and unfashionably, for the reform that would one day make the first job unnecessary.

The smart money has already voted against Indian education. I understand every one of those votes. I just refuse to accept them as the final result. Because a country does not become Viksit Bharat — a developed India by 2047 — on the strength of the children it helped escape. It becomes developed on the strength of the ones it chose not to fail.

That choice is still ours to make. But the demographic clock is running, the smart money has already moved, and the window will not wait for our committees.

Let us have the argument. Loudly — in the comments, in the staff rooms, in the policy halls, at the kitchen tables. Disagree with me; I have been provocative on purpose, and I would rather be argued with than ignored. Because the one outcome this country can no longer afford is the quiet one: a generation of Rahuls, paying for decades, for a promise we all knew we had stopped keeping.

The floor is yours.

Frequently asked questions

Is a college degree still worth it in India in 2026?

It depends almost entirely on which institution — and that is the core problem. A degree from an IIT, a top NIT, an elite IIM, or a strong liberal-arts institution remains one of the best investments an Indian family can make, breaking even in months and generating crores in lifetime premium. A degree from an average private college can take 7–20+ years merely to break even and may leave a loan-financed family in years of financial stress. Families currently have no reliable, verified way to tell these two outcomes apart before they pay — which is exactly why India needs a public graduate-outcomes registry.

Why is graduate unemployment in India higher than unemployment among less-educated people?

Because India has expanded qualifications faster than capabilities, and faster than the economy has created suitable white-collar jobs. Less-educated workers enter sectors with steady demand — agriculture, construction, retail, logistics — while graduates hold out for degree-linked roles that either do not exist in sufficient numbers, pay below expectations, or demand skills the degree never taught. The result is a prolonged holding pattern of exam preparation and underemployment during the most productive early years of life.

Was Saurabh Mukherjea right that you're better off not going to university?

He is right about the diagnosis — for many students at weak institutions, the degree delivers a poor financial return, and the system over-rewards rote memorisation. But the advice is incomplete and risky for the majority. For tens of millions of first-generation and lower-income Indians, the degree remains the only institutional ladder available. The answer is not to abandon the ladder but to fix it — through outcome transparency, embedded work experience, and skills-first hiring.

What is the single most important education reform India could make right now?

Build a National Graduate Outcomes Registry — a verified, public link between institutions and the real employment outcomes of their graduates, cross-referenced with EPFO data. Almost every other failure in the system — inflated placements, prestige-chasing, input-obsessed regulation — rests on the fact that real outcomes are currently invisible. Make them visible, and you make every other reform possible.

Does UniGo Education think students should study abroad instead of in India?

No — not as a blanket answer. UniGo Education's position is that studying abroad should be a genuine choice for a specific opportunity, not a desperate escape from a domestic system that failed to offer a fair return. We help each student find the best honest path for them, in India or abroad, and we simultaneously advocate for the reforms that would make India's own institutions worth staying for.

About the author

Nikhil Seth is the Founder of UniGo Education, a premier study-abroad and education advisory. He works at the intersection of student aspiration, global admissions, and India's education-to-employment challenge, and writes on reforming Indian higher education so that leaving the country becomes a choice rather than an escape.

📞 +91-70650 11173 | 📧 hello@unigoeducation.in

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The views expressed are the author's own opinion, offered to stimulate public debate on reforming Indian education.