India has set itself a big target. Under the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, the government wants to raise the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education to 50% by 2035. GER simply means the percentage of young people, aged 18 to 23, who are enrolled in college or university.
Right now, India is far from that goal. The latest data from the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE), covering 2023-24, shows the national GER stands at 30%. That is up from just 23.7% in 2014-15.
Total enrolment has grown from 3.42 crore students to a record 4.5 crore over the same decade. So the numbers are moving in the right direction. But reaching 50% in the next nine years will need a much faster pace than what India has managed so far.
Here is where the story gets interesting. At the same time that the government is pushing more young Indians toward college degrees, several senior bureaucrats and successful professionals have openly said that degrees are not what matters most in a career.
Many of India’s top officials and business leaders built their careers in an era when having one degree was enough. Practical experience, hard work, and on-the-job learning counted for more than a stack of certificates. Their message to today’s youth is blunt: a degree alone does not guarantee a job or success.
This raises a real question for every student, parent, and young professional in India: does the country actually need more degree-holders, or does it need more skilled people?
What the job market is really saying
The India Skills Report 2026, prepared by ETS along with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), AICTE, and the Association of Indian Universities, gives us a clue. It found that overall employability, meaning how job-ready graduates are, has risen to 56.35% in 2026. That is up from 54.81% the year before, and from just 46.2% in 2022. That is genuine progress. But look closer, and the picture is uneven.
Employability varies hugely by field. Computer Science and IT engineering graduates are the most job-ready, at 80% and 78% respectively. This is driven by demand in artificial intelligence, automation, and data analytics. Commerce graduates have also improved sharply.
But MBA graduates, once seen as guaranteed high-earners, saw their employability drop to 72.76% from 78% the previous year. This is a sign that companies now want specific, applied skills rather than a general management degree.
Even more telling, graduates from Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and polytechnics, which focus on hands-on vocational skills, showed employability of only 45.95% and 32.92%. This suggests that skill-based training alone, without strong industry links, does not automatically solve the problem either.
In other words, it is not simply “degree versus skill.” It is about which specific skills, and how well education, whatever form it takes, connects to what employers actually need.
The AI factor changes everything
Adding to this shift, the same report found that more than 90% of employees across industries are now using generative AI tools at work. A large share of IT and financial firms have also adopted AI-based hiring systems.
This means the job market is evolving faster than most college curriculums can keep up with. A degree earned four years ago may already be teaching outdated skills by the time a student graduates.
At the same time, India’s gig and freelance workforce is projected to grow to 23.5 million workers by 2030. Project-based hiring has risen sharply in the past year too. More people are building careers through short-term projects, certifications, and freelance work rather than the traditional degree-to-job pipeline.
So what should India actually chase?
This does not mean degrees are useless. A degree still opens doors, especially in fields like medicine, law, engineering, and research, where formal qualification is essential.
But the data suggests India’s 50% GER target will only be meaningful if it comes paired with real skill-building, not just more enrolment numbers on paper. Simply pushing more students into general degree programmes, without fixing outdated syllabi or connecting education to real industry demand, risks producing more graduates who still are not job-ready.
The bureaucrats questioning the value of degrees are, in a sense, pointing at a gap the data confirms. Employability is rising, but unevenly, and the fields with the strongest link to practical, current skills are pulling ahead.
For India’s students, the smarter approach may not be choosing between a degree and a skill. It may be making sure that whichever path they choose is built around what the job market actually rewards, today and in the years ahead.
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