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The Degree Settlement. 5 essays
Five essays on how India expanded higher education without building the ledger — who supplies the seats, who teaches in them, who certifies them, who leaves, and whether the degree reaches a job. India added 408 universities in seven years and a further 91 lakh students. What it did not add was the record that would let anyone say who is answerable for the result.
01 Education & Skills · Series Where the Seats Came From — Private Supply and the Regulator That Did Not Follow Between 2014-15 and 2021-22 India added 408 universities and about 7,000 colleges. On the Ministry of Education's own returns, 65.3 per cent of responding colleges are private un-aided. The expansion was overwhelmingly private. The architecture built to supervise it was designed for a public system. 21 AUGUST 2026 02 Education & Skills · Series The Post Nobody Filled — Faculty Vacancy as the Binding Constraint As on 31 January 2025, 56.18 per cent of professor posts across India's central higher education institutions were vacant, on the Parliamentary Standing Committee's own figures. The shortage inverts the academic pyramid — worst at the top, worst again in reserved categories — and the ministry's position is that recruitment is not its responsibility. 23 AUGUST 2026 03 Education & Skills · Series Who Grades the Grader — Accreditation After the Arrests On 1 February 2025 the CBI arrested the chairman and six members of a NAAC inspection committee. The FIR describes ₹1.8 crore sought for a score above 3.65 and an A++ grade. Nearly 900 assessors were then removed. The response treated the assessors as the fault. The fault is in a design that makes a grade worth buying and cheap to sell. 25 AUGUST 2026 04 Education & Skills · Series The Students Who Leave — The Outflow, Its Measurement, and the Campuses Built to Answer It Departures for study abroad fell from about 8.94 lakh in 2023 to 6.26 lakh in 2025 — a fall produced by visa policy in four other countries, not by anything India did. Asked what these students spend, the government told Parliament it does not maintain the information. Four foreign campuses now operate here under two regulators, and neither publishes what any of them enrolled. 27 AUGUST 2026 05 Education & Skills · Series The Degree and the Job — What the Apprenticeship Numbers Actually Say Apprentices engaged under NAPS rose from 3.08 lakh in 2020-21 to 9.85 lakh in 2024-25 — real growth, set against 4.33 crore students in higher education. Two ministries run one statute, two evaluations report employment on incompatible definitions, and nobody publishes the number that matters: how many apprentices hold a job a year later. 28 AUGUST 2026