In India's higher education, few prizes for 2nd place-By Anand Giridharadas / International Herald Tribune Published: November 26, 2006

MUMBAI: It would seem a good time to be Kinjal Bhuptani. She is a college student studying business in the financial capital of one of hottest economies on earth.

But she has no illusions of sharing in India's new found prosperity when she graduates from Hinduja College this spring. While others land $100,000-a- year jobs at Goldman Sachs and Microsoft, she is more likely to make $4 a day selling credit cards door to door.

Bhuptani's mistake, if you can call it that, was not getting into one of India's most elite universities, like the Indian Institutes of Management or Indian Institutes of Technology. Those who are admitted go on to enjoy handsome paychecks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and to steward some of the world's largest companies.

In the shadow of those marquee institutions, most of the 11 million students in the 18,000 Indian colleges and universities receive starkly inferior training, heavy on obeisance and light on marketable skills, students, educators and business leaders say. All but a tiny handful of graduates are considered unemployable by top global and local companies.

"We might as well not have studied," Bhuptani said.

The Indian educational system is locking millions of students in the bottom berth of a two-tier economy, critics argue, depriving the country of the fullest expression of their talents and denying students a chance to share in the fruits of reform.

The problem, experts say, lies in a classroom environment that infantilizes students well into their mid-20s, emphasizing silent note-taking and discipline at the expense of analysis, debate and persuasion.

Students at second- and third-tier colleges suffer not because of a dearth of technical ability or intelligence, critics note. Most simply lack the "soft skills" sought by a new generation of employers but still not taught by change-resistant colleges: the ability to speak crisp English with a placeless accent, to design and give PowerPoint presentations, to write in logically ordered paragraphs, to work collegially in teams, to grasp the nuances of leadership.

"It's almost literally a matter of life and death for them," said Kiran Karnik, president of the National Association of Software and Services Companies, an influential trade body that represents many of India's leading employers. A study that the group published last year concluded that just 10 percent of Indian graduates with generalist degrees were considered employable by major companies, compared with 25 percent of engineers.

"The university has become a placeholder," said Pratap Bhanu Mehta, a former Harvard professor who recently resigned in frustration from the National Knowledge Commission, a panel advising the Indian government on overhauling its education system.

India is one of those rare countries where you become less able to find a job the more educated you get. College graduates suffer from higher jobless rates - 17 percent in the 2001 census - than high school graduates.

But even as graduates complain of the paucity of jobs, companies across India lament the lack of skilled talent at their disposal. The paradox is explained, experts say, by the poor quality of the undergraduate experience. India's thousands of colleges are swallowing millions of new students every year, only to spit out degree holders that no one wants to hire.

The differences between elite colleges and those attended by the majority can be striking.

Enter the manicured lawns and rarefied world of St. Stephens College in New Delhi, one of the country's best- known colleges. As an institution that counts among its alumni a well-known novelist (Amitav Ghosh), a top UN official (Shashi Tharoor), and a former president of Pakistan (General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq), St. Stephens offers an illustration, through contrast, of what lesser institutions lack.

P. Jacob Cherian, the acting principal, said the essential difference was a focus on leadership and communication skills, neglected at most other institutions. As on leading Western campuses, the students have frequent chances to meet and attend speeches by prominent leaders.

"It's when you practice the skills that you actually learn them," Cherian said.

But outside elite enclaves like St. Stephens, tertiary education is a exercise in drudgery.

Take, for example, Hinduja College in Mumbai. It is located in one of India's richest enclaves, but it is a second-tier, no-name school, exemplifying a middling college experience - neither the best nor the worst.

In between lectures, dozens of students swarmed around the reporter to complain about their education.

"What the market wants and what the school provides are totally different," said Sohail Kutchi, a commerce student.

The students said they were not learning to communicate effectively, even as mainstay activities in the Indian economy evolve from pushing papers to answering phones and making presentations. There were few chances to work in groups or hold discussions. And in this purportedly English-language college, the professors used bad grammar and spoke in thick accents.