Overqualified & Out

There’s no such thing as being too educated for a job, if you want /need that job & do it competently 

India produces ambition industrially and then fulfils it homeopathically, in doses much smaller than expected. 10mn new graduates are milled every year, graduates form two-thirds of the unemployed 20-29 year olds. A particular cruelty is that after someone’s stacked up the degrees, because they believed these would translate into a nice job, they are told, shoo, go away, you’re overqualified. Just this week, the Supreme Court – wrongly, in our view – set aside the appointment of a temporary bank attendant, not because he’s incompetent, but because he’s a graduate. And the job was earmarked for those schooled up to Class 10.

When a person, fully aware of what the role entails, under no illusion about its salary or station, still wants it, why penalise them for being too educated? The way the Indian economy, indeed the world economy, is going, the predictable days of x CV fitting into y job opening, are behind us. When only 10% of the 1.5mn engineers expected to graduate in a year are expected to get a job, we are only making the situation worse by fixating on the ‘right’ vs ‘wrong’ job for them. Yes, some engineers become cab drivers. Some literature docs from JNU are writing SEO content (500 words on the best mattresses under ₹10,000), their Keats and Kafka judging them from the shelf. Some govt ad for a peon’s job, requiring only Class V, sees each vacancy draw as many as 1400 applications from grads+postgrads+PhDs alone. 

The promise that education will lead to good income and status is broken often. But we can make things better. Put ‘overqualified’ in the bin. Whatever else is changing, people are still chasing the feeling that their life amounts to something. Let’s not tell them that this can only be through a narrow set of approved occupations. Maybe there is more meaningful work to be found around us, when we show the willingness to call it that.