Stocks● Neutral
Indian Universities Face AI Disruption: Op-Ed Warns of Jobless Graduates
AI is eliminating entry-level jobs, forcing a rethink of higher education. A university director argues colleges must become 'sandboxes' for self-discovery and agility, or face irrelevance.
Continue with
The promise that a university degree guarantees a job is breaking down as artificial intelligence automates entry-level roles, according to a senior academic who argues that Indian higher education must fundamentally rethink its purpose.
“The corporate hierarchy is aggressively shifting from a pyramid to a diamond,” wrote Purushottam Khandu, director of the School of Technology at Dhirubhai Ambani University in Gandhinagar, in an op-ed. At the bottom, where fresh graduates used to find work, companies now deploy AI to automate tasks, while roles at the centre and top demand synthesis, creativity and adaptability.
“With fewer entry-level positions available, an uncomfortable question haunts every student and parent in India while choosing a college: Why go to a certain university if it no longer guarantees a job?” Khandu wrote.
The answer, he argued, requires tearing down the current view of higher education. The university can no longer be seen merely through the lens of immediate employment. It must become “the student’s ultimate sandbox, a place of radical self-discovery, intellectual friction and exploration.”
Khandu said the three-to-four-year university window is the only period in a young person’s life when they have the intellectual freedom, resources and safety net to experiment without ruinous consequences. Schools are too rigid, he wrote, and the workforce has too high a cost of failure.
“In an age where AI makes tomorrow entirely unpredictable, the only defence we can give our youth is agility,” Khandu wrote. “We must teach them to think like entrepreneurs, not necessarily to build startups, but to navigate ambiguity.”