Identifying the information gaps in our education system

Abstract

School years are the most critical years of a student's life when he/she can develop all the interests and skills that will help throughout his/her education and career. But our outdated education system ends up wasting all these critical years of a student's life by slogging him/her through a curriculum that hardly finds any usage in the actual career. Students generally make uninformed career decisions because of herd mentality, societal norms, and limited knowledge of all the career possibilities. For instance, every year more than 15 lakh students appear for the JEE exam but there are around 1 lakh engineering seats only including Tier-I and Tier-II colleges. The 14 lakh students who fail to get into engineering colleges even struggle to grab other career opportunities because they lack the required skills, which they failed to develop during the school years. Even the students who get admissions to engineering colleges are not aware of what an engineer does. There exists an information gap in our system about which factors will help a student in his career as well as towards his/her holistic development for pursuing multiple interests and career opportunities.