NITI Aayog: only 8.25 percent of graduates work in jobs that match their degrees

Only 8.25 percent of Indian graduates work in jobs that match their qualifications, NITI Aayog has said, citing the Economic Survey 2024-25. Graduate unemployment stands at 13 percent, and at 20.4 percent for graduate women, against a national unemployment rate of 3.2 percent. The policy think tank’s report, “Reimagining Skilling for Viksit Bharat,” points to a simple crowding pattern behind those figures. Of 3.4 crore students in undergraduate courses, 1.13 crore are in BA programmes. BA, BSc and BCom together account for more than 2 crore enrolments.

The report says many students take those degrees mainly to stay eligible for government jobs. Between November 2024 and July 2025, 1.86 crore applications landed on 55,000 government posts. That ratio, 338 applications per vacancy, is the labour-market expression of a classroom choice made three years earlier. A generic degree keeps a candidate inside the exam hall. It does not, on the evidence NITI presents, place most of them in work that uses the degree.

A system built for exams, not tasks

NITI describes a structural imbalance that runs across degree colleges, industrial training institutes and polytechnics. The first group absorbs the bulk of enrolment. The second and third are supposed to feed workshops and sites. Employers, the report argues, still cannot find the applied skills they say they need, while campuses keep producing generalists who then sit for public service tests.

The proposed turn is toward specialised, job-linked routes inside the same large degrees: BA Hospitality, BCom Analytics, BSc Applied Technology. The report also wants a much wider use of work-integrated and apprenticeship-embedded degree programmes, and more public-private partnerships in course design. The vocabulary is familiar from a decade of skill missions. The enrolment numbers are the part that has not moved. Two crore people in three generic degrees is a fact that policy papers have described before. It is also the fact that still organises most college towns.

Women’s graduate unemployment at 20.4 percent is the sharpest line in the set. It means a degree raises measured joblessness relative to the national average rather than lowering it. Some of that gap is delayed entry, unpaid care and hiring bias. Some of it is the same mismatch the report names for men, with fewer fallback jobs in the informal trades that still absorb male generalists.

What a redesigned BA would have to do

A BA that includes a hospitality or analytics track is still a BA if the extra papers are optional and unexamined by employers. Apprenticeship-embedded degrees work when a firm signs for a student and a regulator counts the hours. They fail when the “apprenticeship” is a certificate printed at the end of an unchanged syllabus. NITI’s call for industry to sit inside programme design is an attempt to stop that failure. It depends on firms that want apprentices enough to supervise them, and on universities willing to give those hours credit.

Government hiring cannot clear 1.86 crore applications. Private hiring will not clear them either if the signal a BA, BSc or BCom sends is only that the holder finished school and waited. The report’s bet is that a named specialisation plus time on a site changes the signal. Whether colleges can staff those specialisations, and whether students will choose them over the exam-safe general course, is the next test.

Faculty who have taught a general BA for twenty years are not automatically faculty who can teach analytics or hospitality operations. Firms that want cheap interns are not automatically firms that will assess a student against a syllabus. State governments run most of the colleges that hold those two crore enrolments. A NITI paper does not rewrite their statutes. It can set a template and a funding preference. The 8.25 percent alignment figure is the current score. It is the number a reform has to beat.