A recent conversation with a colleague in Bengaluru about his daughter’s college admission made me rethink a common assumption. Like many parents, he was using Delhi University’s admission trends to judge which courses offer the best prospects. This year, DU received over 2 lakh applications for around 71,600 undergraduate seats, with BCom (Honours) again topping the list, followed by English, political science and history. Many read these preferences as a national verdict on what young Indians want to study. They are not. DU’s admission data are best understood not as a picture of India, but as a picture of Delhi.
Let’s start with commerce. Its popularity is usually explained in general terms: it keeps career options open, does not require early specialisation and prepares students for careers in chartered accountancy, banking, finance or business management. All of this is true, but it does not explain why commerce is particularly strong in Delhi, or why it is weaker in some regions.
The explanation lies in what surrounds the university. Delhi’s economy has a large services and finance sector, corporate headquarters and easy proximity to professional bodies such as the Institute of Chartered Accountants of India. A commerce degree from a Delhi college sits inside an ecosystem that can absorb it. The same degree, studied elsewhere, yields different realistic outcomes because the surrounding economy is different.
Now consider English, political science and history. The national debate treats the humanities as a single, declining category, propped up by nostalgia rather than by employability. DU’s numbers do not support that. The explanation again lies outside the classroom. Delhi is the seat of Parliament, the Supreme Court, the central ministries, major media houses, think tanks and international agencies. It is also the country’s principal hub for civil services preparation. For a student aiming at public policy, law, journalism, research or the civil services, a humanities degree from a Delhi college is a route into a visible local job market.
This is why comparing Delhi’s preferences with, say, southern India is more informative than comparing Delhi with an imagined national average. States such as Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Telangana have built strong manufacturing, technology and healthcare sectors. Engineering, medicine and applied science carry more local weight there, not because students in the south value the humanities less, but because the regional economy offers denser pathways to a job. The same student with the same interests would likely make a different choice depending on the labour market they expect to enter. This has direct implications for how reform is designed.
In recent years, universities have introduced multidisciplinary degrees, skill-based certificates and flexible curricular structures under the National Education Policy. These reforms are usually designed and evaluated at the national level on the assumption that a good curriculum will attract students wherever it is offered. However, admission data suggest this assumption needs revision. Students continue to prefer familiar, long-established degrees over newer interdisciplinary ones, not necessarily because the new programmes are bad, but because their outcomes are less proven in the local job market students are targeting.
A new programme has to earn local credibility before it can compete with an old one, and that credibility takes time to build. A reform that succeeds in one city may fail in another for reasons unrelated to the curriculum. Even migration after graduation does not undo this. Students often study in one region and work in another. However, a degree’s value is largely captured where it is earned, through networks, internships and credibility built during the years of study, before any later move.
There is a second implication for how we read the aspect of competition for seats. Students compete intensely for a small number of prestigious universities partly because institutional reputation substitutes for uneven quality elsewhere in the system. This is a real problem, and expanding access to good institutions, therefore, remains absolutely necessary. But it is a separate problem from the one this piece addresses. Even if every region had an equal number of good universities, the subjects most in demand would still differ by region, because the demand is shaped by what the local economy can do with a graduate, not only by how good the teaching is.
None of this means admission data is unreliable; it just means they should be read as local data. A student’s choice reflects family expectations, available information and perceived opportunity, filtered through the city or region they live in and expect to work in. These perceptions do not always align with actual labour market needs. India continues to have graduate unemployment alongside real shortages of skilled workers in several sectors, but that gap also plays out differently by region.
Educators, parents, students and policymakers who want to understand Indian higher education should stop looking for a single national story in admission numbers. Delhi’s data describes Delhi’s opportunity structure. Chennai’s or Bengaluru’s would describe theirs. The right question is not “what do young Indians want to study?” It is “what does a degree from this university, in this city, actually lead to?”
In other words, admission trends are to be read region by region. Until that happens, they will continue to be misread as a single verdict on a country that does not have a single labour market.
John J Kennedy | Former Professor and Dean, Christ (Deemed) University, Bengaluru
(Views are personal)