Last week, while I was scrolling through Instagram, I came across a reel of an influencer promoting a random developer certificate. They claimed that even without any prior coding experience, by doing this program, one would land a premium tech job after just three months.
When I opened the comment section, I didn’t see skepticism. I saw thousands of college
graduates asking where to apply for it!
In India, there is a surge in BA and B.Com graduates who cannot find suitable jobs for their
degrees. It’s a real crisis—many graduates entering the job market feel trapped between unemployment and low-paying temporary work.
This problem has arisen because of a curriculum in which rote learning is still dominant and
the system equates certificates with actual skills.
At the same time, an industry has emerged in society with a pitch so compelling that many
students are drawn to the shortcut placement guarantee. Their model is: you pay them,
then complete a short training program after which they get you hired. And if
they don’t, they give your money back.
The golden words of “100% placement rate” in a reel are enough for people to search for the link, but it doesn’t often mean the job people think it is. What students don’t seem to grasp before giving their money is that “placement” most of the time means unpaid low-value internships, sales roles which are commission only or short-term gigs that vanish in weeks.
Your institution may mark you as hired, but the disguised unemployment remains unchanged.
Yet, students are not so naive. They are people acting rationally and responding to a
broken system. They are doing a thing that the market seems to reward. For example, a
graduate from a Tier-2 city with a B.Com degree and no network cannot be called foolish if he pays fifty thousand rupees for a certificate. But the reality is that the market doesn’t really reward it either.
And this is what makes this industry predatory rather than just incompetent, because it
specifically targets the anxiety of a lower-middle class student with a degree that failed to deliver. The program doesn’t fix the degree’s failure, it just adds another bill and a line in a résumé that holds no value.
Recently, the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) issued strict guidelines to curb
misleading advertisements in the coaching sector, prohibiting “guaranteed” success claims
and the use of “100% placement”. Notices have been issued to over 30 coaching institutes
and fines have been imposed.
I’m not against acquiring novel skills along with a traditional degree. Our economy is changing rapidly, and students need to have practical exposure outside of the classroom. However, there is a difference between genuine upskilling and the industries that are preying upon desperate students by selling unrealistic promises and guaranteed success. The students are trying to adapt, and some industries are profiting from their fear of being left behind.
Part of the reason that these industries keep on growing is that employability has be-
come a source of tension and anxiety among students. The degrees alone don’t feel sufficient in an environment where the market demands work experience even from recent graduates. The students feel obliged to have new certificates every month. Otherwise, they fear, they may fall behind. In such an atmosphere, the promise of a career begins to look less like a scam and more like survival.
Harshita Chaudhary is a student at Hansraj Model School, New Delhi. Views are personal.