I found myself grappling with the age-old debate about university education versus work experience when a friend, who could not complete a political science degree with an Australian university (no relation to the recent race attacks there), met me over dinner. The issue was financial, with a hoped-for grant not coming through and his finances having stretched real thin. Since this was a post-graduate program and not PhD, he had no option but to discontinue. He is now looking for work, and I found myself ill-informed to advise him on where he should try.

His dilemma reminded me of what the former book editor of an American newspaper once said to me. He had been to university but harboured very poor views on it. Most of his real eduction had come from the work he did — and not just learning the details of the job. He found that just to keep up with the demands of his job, he became an auto-didact, educating himself all that he needed to succeed as an arts journalist. That, and not college, was the most glorious phase of his life, as the security of a job and the absence of  hierarchical pedagogy were a blooming push for freedom.

While university can and does give you the centre around which to draw your life, many people find that their work is at great odds to what they have learnt in school, and by the end of the first decade of passing out, they have forgotten most of what seemed terribly important back then. In my case, for instance, I can probably help you with the construction of a very basic electrical circuit, which is not bad, considering I have no need for such knowledge in my current job as editor/writer. Even my friends who continued with engineering jobs have moved to writing code, which was learnt on the job and not at engineering school. And no, we did not learn Java at school. It was handed down during those six furious months of training at TCS, IBM, Infosys etc.

To succeed on the job requires us to so completely remap our college-addled brain that we are hard-pressed to recognise our former selves one year into the job. The backslapping has given way to a quiet self-awareness. Financial concerns have replaced more mundane ones. And conflicts suddenly seem more grave than the past taught us.

So why go to university then? Well, networking, for one. Being a Stephanian is a badge for life and will open doors for you long after you have forgotten the college and what it taught you. That’s true also for the IITs, IIMs, AIIMS and others. Plus the financial benefits. You are suddenly in another terrain.

But there are thousands of smart young men and women, like my Australia-returned friend, who have not gone to one of these five-star institutes, yet are devoted to improving their lot by some self-learning on the job. The question is, does the system give them a chance to make a decent living?

The gory, frightening and distressful pictures of Indian students in Australia being brutally beaten up is a shameful and disgusting outcome of Indian universities’ inability to provide quality education and absorb discerning Indian students, compelling them to seek admission abroad and set the ball rolling for hurt and abuse.

It speaks of the sad development of human resources in our country that the best known institutes in India—the IIMs— do not figure anywhere in the world’s top 100 MBA schools (as per the FT’s rankings, the only Indian school to make the cut is ISB). There is an urgent need to revamp our entire education edifice so that we are in a position to create world-class universities of the highest standards.

In fact, education should be beyond the control of government authority and its concomitant rules and regulations. Even in the case of the IITs/IIMs, HRD ministers from Murli Manohar Joshi to Arjun Singh to now Kapil Sibal have seen much merit in pronouncing their views on what these institutes need to do, no sooner these ministers assumed power. That is hardly the way to go if one has autonomy as a desirable goal in mind.

Besides, there is much regional disparity when it comes to the quality of educational institutes in India. My city Gwalior has all sorts of institutes—engineering (both government-funded and private), medicine, graduate schools of arts—but their quality is so poor that no one passing out of them can hope to reach anywhere respectable on the dint of his/her  academic credentials.

If a university’s place in the rankings is determined by the quality of its teaching staff, why can’t the government work at establishing at least 10 world-class universities in each discipline and demand higher fees from students to run these places? The salaries that the university pays its staff will not be a constraint then. When people can mortgage their properties and what not to send their children abroad, there is no reason they would not pay a premium to let their wards attend an Indian school which had the likes of Noam Chomsky and Amartya Sen as guest faculty.

That would go some way in preventing students from studying in countries where they have no security of life or limb.