Every year or two the same story appears. A state government advertises a few hundred posts for peons, attendants or drivers, requiring school pass certification. It receives applications numbering in the lakhs, and among them are engineers, postgraduates, and a handful of doctorate holders.
The story is usually written as an oddity. It is the most precise measurement India produces of the gap between the qualifications the country manufactures and the work it has available.
The decision is rational
It is tempting to read these applications as desperation. Look at what the two options actually offer and the choice becomes reasonable.
A government attendant post carries a defined pay scale, revised periodically. It carries medical cover, a pension or contributory equivalent, leave entitlement, protection from arbitrary dismissal, and standing that matters in a small town, including in marriage negotiations and access to credit.
The private sector alternative available to an ordinary graduate in a district town is frequently informal: no written contract, wages set verbally and paid late, no cover of any kind, and dismissal at a day’s notice. Measured over a working life, the attendant post is worth more than the nominally skilled private job, and everyone applying has done that arithmetic correctly.
The PhD applying for a peon’s post is not confused about their qualifications. They are accurately assessing what the labour market offers someone with those qualifications.
Two failures meeting
This is the point where two long running problems intersect.
The first is the quality of the qualification. India awards a very large number of degrees each year through a system that measures enrolment and does not measure learning, a gap examined in the higher education survey. Employers have complained for years that a degree does not reliably indicate capability, and the widely cited estimate that a majority of Indian graduates are not readily employable is discussed in why 60 per cent of graduates remain unemployable.
The second is the shortage of formal jobs. Even a genuinely capable graduate faces a market where the number of positions offering a contract, a payslip and social security is small relative to the number of people qualified on paper to hold one.
Fixing only the first produces better trained people competing for the same scarce formal jobs. Fixing only the second produces jobs that employers say they cannot fill from the available pool. Both are usually proposed alone.
What the degree was bought for
There is a further layer that explains the persistence of the pattern. For most Indian families a degree is not primarily a technical training. It is a mobility instrument, purchased in the belief that it converts into a stable job.
That belief was accurate for the generation whose parents bought it. When higher education was rare, a degree was itself a distinguishing signal and it did convert. As enrolment expanded, the signal weakened. The response of families was not to stop buying degrees but to buy more of them, adding a postgraduate qualification when the graduate one stopped working.
This is why credential inflation continues even as the return falls. Each individual family is making a sensible decision, and the aggregate result is a country with more postgraduates than postgraduate work.
What it costs, beyond the individual
Underemployment on this scale is expensive in ways that unemployment statistics do not capture, because a graduate working as an attendant is fully employed.
- The training is wasted. Years of public and family spending on an engineering education produce no engineering.
- The post is misfilled. An overqualified appointee in a routine role is frequently dissatisfied and leaves when something better appears, so the post churns.
- The signal degrades further. When attendant posts are held by graduates, employers begin to require a degree for roles that never needed one, pushing the next cohort to acquire one.
- Talent leaves. Those with the means to exit do, which is why emigration among qualified young Indians tracks this pattern closely.
Who this falls on hardest
The pattern is not evenly distributed, and the differences say something about who the education system actually served.
A first generation graduate carries the weight of a family’s entire investment and has the least information about which qualifications convert into work. Nobody at home has navigated a job market with a degree, so the choice of course is often made on availability and fee rather than on prospects. The same student is least likely to have the network through which a large share of private jobs are actually filled.
Women face an additional constraint. A family that funded a daughter’s degree may still restrict which cities she can work in, which hours she can keep, and how far she can travel, which removes most of the private options and leaves a nearby government post as the only acceptable outcome. That is one reason women’s applications concentrate so heavily in public recruitment despite women now outnumbering men in higher education.
Rural candidates carry a language penalty on top. A great deal of private hiring screens on English fluency rather than on subject competence, which filters out capable graduates educated in the state language and pushes them towards the exam route where the medium is more accommodating.
None of these are education problems in the narrow sense. They determine whether education converts into work, which is the only measure that eventually matters to the family that paid for it.
What would actually help
Make informal work less punishing
The government job is chased because everything else is insecure. Portable social security, enforceable written contracts, and basic protections attached to the worker rather than the employer would narrow the gap that makes a peon’s post worth a PhD’s application.
Publish what degrees deliver
Course by course, institution by institution employment outcomes a year after graduation. Families are currently investing several years of income on reputation and hope.
Stop requiring degrees that jobs do not need
Where a role genuinely requires school level literacy, the eligibility criterion should say so and the selection should test the work rather than the certificate. Credential requirements that exceed the job are a tax on applicants.
Finish recruitment on time
Some of the crowding at the bottom of the ladder is caused by higher recruitment cycles stalling for years, as we set out in the years aspirants lose between notification and appointment. A candidate who cannot wait applies downward.
What you can do about it
- If you hire: write the requirement the job actually needs. Every unnecessary degree requirement pushes someone into buying one.
- If you are advising a student: ask what a course leads to before asking what it is called. The question is rarely asked at the point the fee is paid.
- If you employ informally: a written agreement and timely payment cost nothing and are the difference between a job and a risk.
- Read the story properly. When lakhs apply for a few hundred low grade posts, the news is not that they applied. It is what that says about everything else on offer.
A country that produces graduates faster than it produces graduate jobs will keep generating this headline. The applicants are behaving sensibly. The system they are responding to is the thing that does not add up.
Featured photo by Shantanu Kumar on Pexels.