Declining employability -- The disconnect between the academics and IT industry

IT industry has caught the imagination of a whole generation and has given hope to many as a path to progress. Many parents and their children dream of making a successful career and life in the IT industry. The IT dreams have resulted in large sections of student community opting for courses that would qualify them to earn a career opportunity in the IT industry. This has also lead to emergence of large number of institutions that offer such courses. With the education sector transforming into another full-fledged industry and business, serious issues and concerns also have emerged with respect to the quality of education imparted in these institutions. With hardly any regulations or quality control mechanisms in place, educational institutions have been mushrooming overnight at every nook and corner of the country and many of them lack needed infrastructure or qualified staff to impart quality education, despite collecting huge amounts from the students. Sadly, the effect is there for everyone to see in terms of declining employability among new graduates coming out of many of such make-shift institutions. The situation calls for a more stringent set of regulations and quality enforcement in the education, as the sector has become a new fiefdom for business forces, operating in a ‘free for all’ manner with hardly any standards, guidelines or meaningful regulatory mechanisms. The disconnect between the industry and the academic has become more glaring, both in terms of meeting the requirements as well as in ensuring proper alignment of  curriculum and syllabus focus. The ever relevant debate of how to mould and align the vision and policies for education in the country with the needs of the society is again on the radar as the industry-academic disconnect widens as it is felt in the IT sector.