How to bridge India’s school-to-career gap

H igher education is increasingly coming under pressure to rethink what it is preparing students for, and how. In India, that question matters even more because secondary education is no longer one uniform story. There are now two very distinct worlds . In one, applied exposure, experimentation, and early career imagination are starting to come in, whether inside schools or through parallel avenues outside them. In the other, students remain in a system that is still centred around preparing for exams that are themselves not fully competency-based, let alone aligned with the real world and workplaces of the future. Even the conditions for applied exposure remain uneven. Official UDISE+ data for 2024-25 shows that only 63.5% of schools had Internet access.