The Choice That Is Not

A NEW MINISTRY OF Education study on the choices students make for higher education tells you that girls prefer arts and boys science, while commerce lags a distant third. And, what is more, in the last one decade, from 2012 to 2022, takers for commerce have remained stagnant while those for the other two are ris­ing. According to a report in The Print: “‘Science and arts are consistently the most popular streams in the last 10 years. Students who opted for science and arts streams have increased from 31 per cent (for both science and arts) in 2012 to 42 per cent and 40 per cent respectively in 2022,’ the study said. More students have also been opting for vocational courses, it added. In terms of absolute numbers, 30.9 lakh students took the arts stream in 2012, which went up to 40 lakh in 2022. The science stream had 30.7 lakh students in 2012, which increased to 42 lakh in 2022. As many as 13.7 lakh students had taken the commerce stream in 2012 and 14.4 lakh pupils in 2022.”

You could explain some of it to the job market, as indeed the study hints, but it is not clear-cut. Professions like chartered accountancy, which was one of the roads leading from commerce, don’t have the same elite appeal as they used to. But then those who get into arts don’t have any great variety of options either. What does a history or literature graduate do, except get into academia? In any other profession, he or she has no advantage. Science gradu­ates overwhelmingly end up in jobs that don’t have anything to do with what they studied. Even engineering no longer guarantees you to stand out because of the massive increase in the number of institutes. Most students anyway have little clue about where their interests lie. Most follow the herd. If you are a girl who wants to drift along, you take arts and boys science— that is about the simplest explanation for it. And if you are serious about a career, no matter what stream you begin with, you do a business manage­ment (MBA) course, the irony being that commerce is probably the best foundation for it.

Except for a small subset who are driven or guided well by elders, Indian students are generally uninvested in the subjects they choose. This is reflected in the disconnect between the life that follows them after college and what they decided to learn. The reason this happens is precisely because they are forced into silos of arts, commerce and science. If you are studying engineering and suddenly develop an interest in history, there is really no path to engage with it academically. Developed countries with a premium on good education have this malleability and it reaps them dividends when the students enter the workforce. In India, education is con­joined to somehow getting a decent job and, earlier, being any graduate what­soever was the precondition, now it is an MBA. Arts, science and commerce are all somewhat irrelevant, no matter how the scales tilt between them.

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