Sandeep Aneja,
Managing Director, Kaizen Private Equity
The huge information gap between the employers and students needs to be bridged
Education is revolutionising very fast. We have achieved a lot, and we can achieve even more by embracing technology in education. It is understood that most people don’t understand technology or don’t have access to it. However, the growth in companies in India that provide test, tutoring and other online services is mindboggling to us as investors.
India can not only catch up with the Western world, it can even beat the advanced countries in the digital space. For instance, there is a company called Coursera in which Stanford Professors have uploaded a lot of their courses online and made them entirely free. Hundreds and thousands of students signed up. If you take the same course in a normal brick and mortar university, it will take you decades to serve that many students. With digital technology, you can serve a hundred thousand students in a matter of hours.
An online course like that of Coursera allows one to not only test the attitude of a student, but also test their analytical ability by monitoring the pace at which one is learning.
About a million students pass out from engineering colleges and IITs each year. 85 percent of them wait for 9 to 10 months to bag a job. On the other hand, employers are also in search for employable talent. There are jobs. There are people. But there is huge information gap between employers and students. This gap needs to be bridged as soon as possible.
It is time for us to embrace the global digital revolution in education and catch up with the rest of the world. And India has a chance to not only catch up, but also beat the world in that space. We have to take the digital path, because India cannot afford to build enough brick and mortar institutions.
