When someone mentioned that there is nothing called unemployability in tech and that if someone has a degree, they should be assumed to be employable, my first reaction was: “Of course there is a notion of unemployability, people do not come out with acceptable skills, I interact with CSE graduates who don’t know enough to be useful in a decent company!“

A few days of internet searches made me realize that probably we are talking about things not worth discussing, and missing the things we should be discussing.

Here are the questions I posed for myself and the answers I found:

• Why don’t we hear employability question for doctors and lawyers?

It is because there are very few of them graduating every year: about 54K doctors and 96K lawyers, and we need much more of each of them.

• Why do I hear the unemployability question only for engineers?

This is not true, similar questions get raised for management graduates as well. As Sriram hinted, most likely this is because of supply-demand mismatch. Both of them have extremely high number of students graduating every year compared to the demand (Engineering: 846K, Management: 232K)

• So is this only a supply problem? Are we confusing unemployment with unemployability?

Excess supply is causing unemployability question to be asked because buyers have choices. However, it is aggravated by rogue elements. When high volume meets high ticket price, you can always find the presence of operators trying to make quick money through unfair means. Average fee for an engineering degree is 4L and an MBA degree is 2.7L, so institutes have mushroomed who find it more cost effective to manage the authorities and sell a degree to unsuitable students rather than make them suitable. These are the unemployable students all of us have met.

For comparison, BEd (degree required for teaching jobs) has 663K students graduating a year (much more than MBA), but you don’t hear about its unemployment or unemployablity (one reason is that it is not glamorous like engineering, medical, management, or lawyer so not fashionable to talk about them). The average fees is about 1 Lac and most of the recruitment is in Govt (about 68% schools are govt schools), there were more than 8 lac seats vacant in govt schools, so no question of unemployability or unemployment (corruption in rampant in BEd degree as well, but that probably is a function of govt being the primary employer).

• Are these percentages of unemployability accurate or reliable?

I don’t think they are accurate or reliable. You will find all kinds of numbers: Engineers unemployability ranges from 80% to 60%. Management graduates unemployability ranges from 50% to 90%.

Most of this data is by companies who conduct tests for employers to filter out applications (which is a symptom of demand-supply mismatch) and their methodologies are too opaque to be trustworthy.

Here are better questions to discuss than the unreliable unemployability numbers:

1. Why do we produce so many engineers in the first place?
2. How do we build systems to track and publish more reliable data about unemployment and unemployability?
3. How do we get rid of rogue elements from running engineering institutes?

Sources

MBA employability:

1. 7% are employable according to this report
2. This one says 10% are employable, I guess in the ballpark still.
3. This one says more than 50% are employable! Methodology problem?

Engineering employability

1. 45% employability of tech
2. 41% employability of engineers, in the ballpark.
3. Less than 20% are employable, methodology problem?

Others

1. Fee cap by govt
2. Enrollment and passout data from AISHE
3. “98.5% of Law graduates are employed and earning good numbers, there is only 1.1% of the section under the law graduates that is unemployed“
4. Doctors are unemployed in a country with a severe crunch of doctors but no talk on unemployability.
5. India Skills Report
6. As per the World Economic Forum, of the 13 million people who join India’s workforce each year, only one in four management professionals, one in five engineers, and one in 10 graduates are employable.
7. Doctors are unemployed in a country where there is a severe shortage of doctors.
8. Teachers: 10 lac vacancies, 4 lac excess teachers on the rolls!, definitely a data problem
9. Teachers: 8.4 lac vacancies in govt school
10. 68% govt schools, so most of the jobs in education are govt. jobs