More than half of Indian graduates are not job ready, what are colleges even teaching?

A Mercer Mettl report tested over 1 million students across 2,700 campuses in India. The result? Only 42.6 percent of graduates are actually employable. That means more than half the students coming out of Indian colleges with degrees cannot get jobs they studied for. Let that sink in. You spend 3 or 4 years in college. You pay lakhs in fees. You give dozens of exams. And at the end, more than half of you are not even employable. What exactly are these colleges teaching? The biggest gap is in soft skills like communication, creativity, and critical thinking. Employers now want people who can do real work from day one, not just show a certificate. But Indian colleges are still stuck in the rote learning model. Memorize the textbook, vomit it in the exam, get marks, get degree. Nobody asks if you actually understood anything. The syllabus in most colleges is 10 to 15 years outdated. Computer science students are learning programming languages that nobody uses anymore. Business students are studying management theories from the 1990s. And then companies have to spend 6 months retraining these graduates to make them actually useful. The India Skills Report 2025 confirms that employers struggle to find job ready talent despite a growing pool of graduates. So we have millions of graduates but companies cannot find people who can do the job. That is a massive failure of the education system. And who pays for it? The students. Their parents take loans, sell land, empty savings to pay for college. And the student gets a degree that is worth less than the paper it is printed on. The govt keeps talking about demographic dividend. What dividend? If 57 percent of your graduates are unemployable, you do not have a demographic dividend, you have a demographic disaster. The UGC and AICTE keep adding new colleges and courses but nobody is checking if these colleges are actually teaching anything. Many private colleges are just degree mills. Pay fees, attend classes (or do not, nobody cares), pass exams (or buy the question paper), get degree. The faculty in many colleges is underqualified and underpaid. Professors are hired based on political connections, not merit. Many do not even attend classes. They send a junior assistant to take attendance and read from a 10 year old PowerPoint. And we wonder why graduates are not job ready? The govt talks about Make in India and Skill India but the ground reality is unchanged. Engineering colleges keep producing graduates who cannot write a simple program. MBA colleges produce graduates who cannot analyze a basic balance sheet. Law colleges produce graduates who do not know the difference between civil and criminal cases. And medical colleges, well, that is a whole different scandal with NEET and capitation fees. The solution is not more colleges or more courses. The solution is quality. Hold colleges accountable for placement rates. Audit their curriculum regularly. Shut down colleges that produce unemployable graduates. But the govt will not do this because education is a massive business in India. Thousands of crores change hands in the name of higher education. College owners, politicians, bureaucrats, all profit from this broken system. The student is just a customer who gets a worthless product. Are Indian colleges just selling degrees or does the system need a complete overhaul?