India’s education has expanded dramatically in enrolment yet produces widespread credential inflation, a persistent learning crisis and a culture of endless high-stakes testing that begins in school and continues long after formal degrees are awarded. Degrees have been reduced to screening devices of declining labour market value; universities and employers routinely distrust their own credentials and impose further filters(NEET,JEE,GATE, UGC-NET,CSIR-NET, state and institutional entrances, recruitment exams). Recurrent scandals- most recently the 2026 NEET-UG paper leak-expose institutional fragility. Responses such as the resignation of the education minister, restructuring of the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the creation of a high-powered task force under Nandan Nilekani remain managerial patches on a structurally commercialized and privatized system. Drawing on a scientific dialectical method and a historical materialist reading of post-independence policy shifts, this paper argues that degree devaluation is not accidental but the predictable outcome of under-funded public education, neo-liberal expansion without quality safeguards and an examination industry that thrives on scarcity and anxiety. Comparative lessons from systems that trust school-leaving credentials more fully(Finland, Germany, parts of continental Europe) are examined. Cosmetic committees cannot resolve a systemic contradiction; only a decisive reorientation towards genuine learning outcomes, reduced high-stakes competition and restored public responsibility can restore value to degrees.
The paper examines concrete pathways for restoring reliability to degrees within the existing institutional framework and where that proves insufficient, outlines the contours of a sounder alternative system. It argues that degrees can regain credibility only when continuous, authentic, competency-based assessment inside institutions becomes the primary signal of learning when public quality is expanded sufficiently to reduce artificial scarcity and when high-stakes external filters and the parallel coaching industry are systematically dismantled or rendered redundant. Managerial patches alone will not suffice; a dialectical resolution requires both immediate reforms within the present structure and a longer-term synthesis that prioritizes learning over ranking.
The Paradox of Expansion and Emptiness:
India today enrolls more than 43 million students in higher education across roughly 60000 colleges and 1200 universities. Literacy and gross enrolment ratios have risen substantially since independence. Yet the system is widely recognized as being in crisis: foundational literacy and numeracy deficits persist into the upper primary years (ASER surveys); large proportions of graduates lack workplace-ready skills; graduate unemployment and under-employment remain high; and the wage premium attached to a degree has eroded for recent cohorts, especially in high-expansion districts and for historically disadvantaged groups.
The most visible symptom is the devaluation of the degree itself. A graduate or postgraduate degree no longer functions as a reliable signal of knowledge or competence. Employers, professional councils and even the awarding universities themselves treat it as a necessary but insufficient filter, requiring further batteries of tests. The result is a multi-layered schooling and higher education apparatus that generates credentials while systematically undermining learning those credentials is supposed to certify.
This paper examines the phenomenon through a dialectical and historical lens. The central contradiction is between quantitative expansion (the thesis of access and democratization) and qualitative degradation under market pressures (the antithesis of commercialization and credential inflation). The synthesis required is a system that restores trust in continuous, authentic assessment rather than perpetual high-stakes examination.
Historical Trajectory: From Public Promise to Market Capture-
At Independence, education was framed as a public good essential to nation building. The University Education Commission (1948-49) under S. Radhakrishnan and subsequent policy documents emphasized quality, equity and the state’s primary responsibility. Private philanthropy existed, but commercialization was constrained.
The shift began in the 1980s and accelerated after the 1991 liberalization. The National Policy on education 1986 and its Programme of Action already encouraged institutions to generate internal resources. The economic crisis of the late 1980s and the subsequent LPG reforms recast higher education increasingly as a non-merit good. Capitation-fee colleges in medicine and engineering proliferated; the Birla-Ambani Report (2000) explicitly advocated private capital; self-financing courses became common. By the 2010s and 2020s, roughly two-thirds of colleges operated under private management (unaided or aided). Public expenditure on higher education as a share of the union budget declined sharply, while private expenditure and fee burdens rose. This historical movement is dialectical. The thesis of democratization (expansion of seats, reservations, mass enrolment) collided with the antithesis of fiscal austerity and market logic. The resulting synthesis has been an enlarged but hollowed-out system: more degrees, lower average quality and a parallel coaching industry that has become a de-facto education system. Learning outcomes stagnated or declined even as paper credentials multiplied-a classic case of credential inflation documented in labour-market studies.
The Learning Crisis and the Devaluation of Degrees:
Empirical evidence is consistent. ASER reports repeatedly show large fractions of Grade 5 students unable to read Grade 2 text or perform basic arithmetic. In higher education the pattern continues: high marks coexist with low skills in problem-solving, communication and application. Employer surveys and skills reports place graduate employability well below desirable thresholds; many graduates enter the labour market lacking demonstrable competencies. Wage returns to a degree remain positive on average but have eroded for post-2004 cohorts in districts that expanded rapidly. The groups theoretically most expected to benefit from expansion (SC/ST workers) have borne a disproportionate share of the penalty- a ‘double whammy’ of credential devaluation and statistical discrimination. Degrees function less as certificates of human capital and more as crude screening devices. When the pool of degree holders expands without corresponding quality investment, the signal weakens and employers demand additional filters.
The Perpetual Examination Regime:
Since degrees are distrusted, a dense ecology of entrance and recruitment tests has grown: NEET for medical seats, JEE for engineering, GATE for postgraduate technical programmes and PSU recruitment, UGC-NET and CSIR-NET for lectureship and research fellowships, state-level SETs, university-specific entrances and host of civil-service and banking examinations. Even after a valid postgraduate degree, candidates routinely sit multiple further tests for Ph. D. admission or academic posts. The focus on ‘Rote Learning’ and ‘Cracking’ examinations instead of holistic development is killing talent. Our system is creating frustrated and victimized generations. NEET example cannot be ignored. This year 2.2 million students appeared for the exam. 5% were selected for the 1, 39,489 MBBS seats. Apart from this, 25-35 thousand students will go abroad to study MBBS-mainly to Europe, Philippines and Bangladesh. If they want to practice in India after they return, they will have to score above the 50% cut-off in NEET. This explains why we have a shortage of doctors. Even after this, 2 million students are left. Many of them would have also taken the CUET-Common University Entrance Test-to get admission in central universities and their colleges which have their own set of challenges. Besides this, several lakh other students must be appearing for JEE for engineering college admissions. But even after clearing this first hurdle, there is no escape from competitive exams-whether for post graduation, Ph. D., teaching jobs or anything else. Children from Indian middle class or lower-income families get trapped from the age of 15 in an endless loop of coaching classes, competitions, paper leaks and re-examinations.
This regime is self-reinforcing. Scarcity of quality seats and jobs combined with heterogeneous school boards of unequal credibility justifies national common tests. The tests themselves become high-stakes tournaments that reward coaching, rote techniques and periodically malpractice. The coaching industry has grown into a multi-billion-rupee parallel system that begins in class 9-10 and continues through postgraduate years. Education is subordinated to examination performance; curiosity, critical thinking and deep learning are collateral damage.
Scandals, NTA and the Limits of Managerial Reform:
The 2024 and especially the 2026 NEET-UG controversies-paper leaks, cancellations, re-examinations involving more than two million candidates, arrests of officials and intermediaries-exposed the institutional fragility of the National Testing Agency. NTA has operated with a thin permanent staff, heavy reliance on contractual and outsourced personnel and insufficient security architecture. Earlier high-level committees (including the 2024 K. Radhakrishnan committee) produced recommendations on permanent staffing, data security and process reforms; implementation has been partial.
The July 2026 announcement of a new high-powered task force under Nandan Nilekani to recommend further examination reforms, couple with talk of legislative tightening and a shift to computer-based testing, follows a familiar pattern: crisis-committee-technological or procedural fix. Such measures may reduce certain vulnerabilities, but they leave untouched the deeper drivers-scarcity of quality public seats, commercial incentives that reward volume over learning and a culture that treats education primarily as a positional good. Constituting successive expert panels while the structural conditions of commercialization and under-funding persist is, in dialectical terms, an attempt to manage the symptoms of a contradiction without resolving it.
Commercialization, Privatization and Systemic Character:
Privatization in Indian education has not primarily taken the form of wholesale transfer of ownership of public institutions. It has proceeded through the rapid growth of private unaided institutions, the introduction of self-financing courses inside public universities, rising fee burdens and the residualisation of government schools and colleges. The result is a dual system: a small tier of elite public and private institutions that retain relative credibility and a large mass sector whose credentials command little trust.
Commercial logic privileges measurable, marketable outputs (enrolment numbers, placement statistics, examination ranks) over the slower less quantifiable processes of genuine intellectual formation. When exchange value displaces use value in the organization of learning, critical thought becomes an obstacle rather than an objective. High-level committees cannot reverse this systemic trajectory; they operate within it.
Comparative perspectives- Systems That Trust Credentials More:
Several high-performing systems rely far less on post-degree national entrance batteries. In Finland basic education is largely free of high-stakes standardized testing. Teachers enjoy high professional autonomy. The matriculation examination at the end of upper secondary is the principal gateway and universities trust it. In Germany the Abitur (school-leaving qualification) confers general university entrance eligibility for most programmes. Central co-ordination (Hochschulstart) is used mainly for highly oversubscribed fields such as medicine. Universities otherwise manage admissions on the basis of the school credential and their own criteria. Switzerland’s dual-track system combines strong vocational pathways with flexible routes into higher education reducing the zero-sum pressure on a single academic track.
These systems are not free of selection, but selection is concentrated at the end of secondary schooling and is embedded in a culture of trust in continuous assessment and teacher professionalism. India’s multi-board heterogeneity and quality variance make pure reliance on school leaving marks difficult; yet the current solution-endless additional national tests- has itself become a source of distortion, anxiety and corruption. A calibrated move towards greater trust in improved secondary credentials combined with continuous internal assessment in higher education and reduced reliance on single high-stakes events is both feasible and necessary.
In lieu of conclusion:
Degrees will regain reliability –for students and teachers alike-only when the system that produces them prioritizes continuous, authentic, competency-based learning and assessment over the accumulation of external filters. Whether through determined reform within the present structure or through a more fundamental redesign, the path forward requires restoring institutional capacity and public trust rather than multiplying tests. Only then can Indian universities once again appoint teachers primarily on the strength of the degrees they themselves award and only then will those degrees cease to be more pieces of paper.
Historically, the earlier practice of appointing teachers on the strength of a university degree reflected a residual trust in the academic process itself. That trust was eroded by expansion without quality. Restoring it and extending it to every learner requires the opposite movement by rebuilding the internal integrity of teaching, research and assessment so thoroughly that external filters become largely unnecessary. Degrees regain substance because they certify a genuine process of inquiry and formation, not because they have been validated by yet another national test. Such a system is not a utopian denial of difference or of limited resources. It is a dialectical negation of the present oppressive synthesis. It recognizes that human beings develop unevenly and along different paths, yet refuses to convert that unevenness into permanent hierarchies of rejection. It places the full development of each person as the condition for the full development of all. In Freire’s terms, it replaces the pedagogy of the oppressed with the pedagogy of liberation-an education that enables people to read the word and the world and to rewrite both. Only when education functions as a coherent, publicly guaranteed subsystem oriented towards critical consciousness and collective humanization will competitions, selections and rejections cease to be its organizing principles. Only then will coaching institutes wither because they are no longer needed. Only then will school, college and university education become sound enough to stand on their own. And only then will the degree cease to be an empty credential and recover its meaning as a record of authentic learning and human growth.
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Dr G Shankar has been associated with teacher education and Educational Research for three decades; former adjunct faculty in ASU, USA in teacher education. He is an executive council member of All India Forum for Right to Education-AIFRTE and Vice President of Indian Social Science Academy – ISSA.