CREDENTIALS FOR THEIR OWN SAKE.  The Popular Perspective holds that expanded production of college degrees expands opportunity, and the middle class.  See, e.g., the G. I. Bill.

Oops.

Call-center company 24/7 Customer Pvt. Ltd. is desperate to find new recruits who can answer questions by phone and email. It wants to hire 3,000 people this year. Yet in this country of 1.2 billion people, that is beginning to look like an impossible goal.


So few of the high school and college graduates who come through the door can communicate effectively in English, and so many lack a grasp of educational basics such as reading comprehension, that the company can hire just three out of every 100 applicants.

It's not a dystopian novel, and it's not the fruits of bilingual non-education gone sour, or multiculturalism substituting grievance for learning.

India projects an image of a nation churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year who are well educated, a looming threat to the better-paid middle-class workers of the West. Their abilities in math have been cited by President Barack Obama as a reason why the U.S. is facing competitive challenges. 

Yet 24/7 Customer's experience tells a very different story. Its increasing difficulty finding competent employees in India has forced the company to expand its search to the Philippines and Nicaragua. Most of its 8,000 employees are now based outside of India. 

In the nation that made offshoring a household word, 24/7 finds itself so short of talent that it is having to offshore. 

"With India's population size, it should be so much easier to find employees," says S. Nagarajan, founder of the company. "Instead, we're scouring every nook and cranny."

Mercantilists in the United States would be doing themselves no favours by introducing rubrics, self-esteem, assessment, and inclusive learning. Administrative tradition in India, coupled with a belief in the credentials rather than in education, is drag enough.

Business executives say schools are hampered by overbearing bureaucracy and a focus on rote learning rather than critical thinking and comprehension. Government keeps tuition low, which makes schools accessible to more students, but also keeps teacher salaries and budgets low. What's more, say educators and business leaders, the curriculum in most places is outdated and disconnected from the real world. 

"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys," says Vijay Thadani, chief executive of New Delhi-based NIIT Ltd. India, a recruitment firm that also runs job-training programs for college graduates lacking the skills to land good jobs.

Next, the education lobby and Our President will suggest we can do India one better by ensuring that all baccalaureates have a master's as an entitlement.  On the other hand, perhaps someone in India will borrow a page from Cold Spring Shops and make the high schools reimburse the colleges for the do-overs.

Another survey, conducted annually by Pratham, a nongovernmental organization that aims to improve education for the poor, looked at grade-school performance at 13,000 schools across India. It found that about half of the country's fifth graders can't read at a second-grade level.


At stake is India's ability to sustain growth—its economy is projected to expand 9% this year—while maintaining its advantages as a low-cost place to do business.

Or perhaps somebody will invoke the not-invented here argument.  (Via Phi Beta Cons.)

The critical point to keep in mind is that low wages are a signal of low productivity.  There comes a level of economic activity at which continued economic growth includes competition for workers.

But before you get too cocky, consider the facts on the ground here.

At the margin, the incremental resources (students) produced from higher education investments are adding less and less output (manifested in employment income) to the economy, as more of them are forced to take relatively low paying jobs. The number of new college graduates exceeds the numbers of new jobs that truly require higher level education skills—mostly positions in management, technical areas, or the professions. Moreover, more and more of the incremental enrollment resulting from higher government subsidies in modern times consists of students lacking the cognitive skills, discipline, prior educational training, etc., necessary for mastering higher order intellectual material.

And yet higher education's special pleaders will persist in scouring the country for those not-yet-discovered high achievers who are somehow still being denied their shot at a degree.