E-Paper
A university can no longer afford to teach for the world that was
Dr Cavita Taragi, Pro Chancellor, Industry Partnerships, Chitkara University, explains why a degree’s value goes beyond the first job.
When a family chooses a university, they are usually asking one question: will this lead to a good job? It is a fair question, and a placement report answers it. But it is the wrong question to stop at. A degree that lands a graduate their first job and then ages badly has done only half of what a good education should. The job market a student enters at twenty-two may look very different by the time they are thirty-two, and the gap between those two worlds is widening as the pace of change quickens.
This is the deeper problem a university has to solve. Not simply how to make a graduate employable on the day they leave, but how to make them the kind of professional who stays relevant as their industry keeps reinventing itself. That is a much harder thing to teach, and it is the real measure of whether an institution is keeping pace with the times or falling behind them.
The gap between the classroom and the workplace is a choice
Employers have complained for years that graduates arrive knowing the theory but not the practice. It is a familiar lament, and it is usually framed as though the gap between what universities teach and what work requires were some natural law. It is not. That distance is a design choice. A curriculum can be written in a faculty room and left untouched for a decade, or it can be built and revised in continuous conversation with the industries that will eventually hire from it. The two produce very different graduates.
The difference shows up long before placement season. It is there in whether a student has worked on a live industry problem or only a textbook one, whether they have used the tools their profession actually runs on, and whether they have sat across from someone who does the job for a living. Where those things are built into a degree, the move into employment can be shorter, and less about learning the basics from scratch once the salary has started.
Relevant should not mean narrow
There is a reasonable worry buried in all of this, and it deserves an honest answer. If a degree is tuned too tightly to what industry wants today, does it leave a graduate stranded when today's skills expire? It is a real risk, and it is the reason genuine industry engagement has to mean more than teaching this year's popular software.
Done well, industry connection produces the opposite of narrowness. A student who has watched how an industry actually thinks, how it defines problems, weighs trade-offs and adapts when conditions shift, has learned something far more durable than any single tool. They have learned how to keep learning inside a field that will not sit still. That is why real relevance and academic rigour are not in tension. The theory explains why things work, and the industry exposure shows what happens when that theory meets a deadline, a budget and a customer. A serious university has to deliver both, or it has delivered neither.
What this looks like when it is built deliberately
This is where industry-academia collaboration stops being a phrase in a brochure and starts showing up in what a student actually does. At Chitkara University, based in Punjab, that approach is built into how students learn rather than added as a layer around the curriculum. Industry engagement is not an annual careers fair. It runs through live projects, internships, certifications and applied work carried out alongside the professionals who do it for a living. The intent is a loop rather than a one-way handover: industry signals what is changing, the curriculum responds, students work with current tools and problems, and what employers then see feeds back into what the university teaches next.
The most concrete form this takes is in the labs. Chitkara University runs more than fifty Centres of Excellence built with industry, among them the Apple iOS Development Centre, the Cisco Networking Lab, the SAP Innovation Lab, the Capgemini Code Experience Center, JioGames Innovation Centre, the Honda Design Lab and the Dassault Systèmes Lab. These are not named after companies as a courtesy. They put students in front of the tools and systems their industries genuinely use, which is a very different thing from reading about them. The same logic runs through the curriculum itself, where degrees are increasingly co-designed with the sectors that need them: an electric-vehicle engineering programme built with ARAI, the country's apex automotive research body, an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning degree developed with Microsoft, an MBA in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence developed with EY India, and a Fintech programme shaped with Deloitte.
Why the placement number is not the only thing to look at
More than three thousand recruiters visit Chitkara University's campuses each year, among them Google, Microsoft, Amazon, PwC, EY, Deloitte, Adobe, Infosys and IBM. It is a strong figure, and a meaningful one. But a placement record is the visible end of a much longer process, not the process itself. Recruiters return in those numbers because of what happens in the years before they arrive: the curriculum built with industry, the labs, the projects, the graduates who need less retraining than their peers. The number is the result. The relevance behind it is what produces the number year after year.
The same principle extends beyond hiring. International university partnerships and global pathway programmes give students exposure to academic and professional environments beyond India, through tie-ups with institutions such as Arizona State University, Deakin University, York University and George Brown Polytechnic. It is an increasingly important part of preparing for careers in markets that no longer stop at national borders.
The point of it all
A university cannot teach for the world it was built in. The disciplines shift, the tools turn over, whole professions appear and fade within a single working life. The institutions that will matter are the ones that treat that churn as the condition to design for rather than a problem to be managed at the edges.
For a student and a family making a choice, the question worth asking is not only where the graduates get placed, but whether the education behind that placement will still be working for them in a decade. A degree earns its value not on the day it is awarded, but over the thirty years that follow. Keeping that education relevant across those years may be the harder measure of a university, and one that deserves as much attention as the first job.
