– Nikhil Barshikar, Founder & CEO, Imarticus Learning

For decades, higher education in India followed a familiar and largely successful model. Students chose a broad discipline at eighteen, spent three or four years acquiring foundational knowledge, and entered industries that expected to provide the final layer of professional learning. It worked because industries evolved gradually and employers invested in bridging the gap between education and practice.

Over the last five years, however, a new category of institution has emerged in India. Neither traditional universities nor training providers, these schools are built around a single industry, offer full undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, are taught largely by practising professionals, and measure themselves by the outcomes their graduates achieve.

Initially regarded as experiments, they are now being chosen deliberately by students and increasingly recognised by employers as a credible pathway into professional careers. Understanding their rise begins with the gap they were created to address.

The India Skills Report 2026, published by ETS in partnership with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), AICTE, the Association of Indian Universities (AIU) and Taggd, places India’s graduate employability at 56.35 per cent, up from 54.81 per cent the previous year. The progress is encouraging, yet more than four in ten graduates are still not considered ready for the roles employers are trying to fill. The gap has narrowed, but it has not closed.

At the same time, the nature of work is changing faster than ever. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39 per cent of workers’ core skills to change by 2030, while 63 per cent identify skills gaps as the biggest barrier to transforming their organisations. Roughly one-fifth of today’s jobs are expected to be fundamentally reshaped within the decade.

Together, these findings describe a structural challenge. On one side is an education system producing graduates at remarkable scale; on the other is an industry redefining relevance every few quarters. A curriculum designed for revision every three to five years was never intended to keep pace with that level of change, and that is no criticism of the institutions that operate it.

Universities remain indispensable. They cultivate intellectual curiosity, research capability and the habits of critical thinking that allow professionals to remain relevant long after specific tools or techniques have become obsolete. The question is not whether universities matter, but whether they were ever meant to carry the entire burden of industry readiness.

Specialised institutions have emerged to share that responsibility, and their strength lies in three areas.

The first is proximity. When faculty are practitioners and advisory boards include the firms that hire graduates, the gap between market needs and classroom teaching is measured in months rather than years.

The second is concentration. A finance school teaches finance from the first semester rather than introducing it through a later elective. A technology school focuses entirely on technology instead of spreading resources across unrelated disciplines. This allows for a level of depth that even outstanding multidisciplinary institutions may struggle to achieve within the same timeframe.

The third is accountability. These institutions publish their outcomes and are judged by them year after year. That creates a demanding standard, often resulting in better teaching, though it also carries a risk.

Financial services provide perhaps the clearest example of why this model has found its moment.

The India Skills Report 2026 records that employability among commerce graduates has risen sharply to 62.81 per cent from around 55 per cent, attributing the improvement to demand from banking, financial services and fintech. Adecco India projects BFSI hiring to grow by 8.7 per cent this financial year and reach 10 per cent by 2030, creating nearly 250,000 permanent roles, almost half of them in Tier II and Tier III cities. According to the foundit Insights Tracker, India’s Global Capability Centres (GCCs) are expected to hire more than 510,000 professionals in 2026, with BFSI and fintech showing the highest hiring intensity of any sector.

The demand is clear. Equally clear is how much the work itself has changed. Sixty-four per cent of new GCC roles created this year require capabilities in artificial intelligence, data science or intelligent automation. Half of all BFSI organisations have already adopted AI-based recruitment systems. A career in finance today sits atop a technology stack, operates within a regulatory framework that evolves every quarter, and expects young professionals to be conversant with both. Preparing graduates for that reality requires a curriculum capable of evolving just as quickly.

The more significant shift, however, is not what is being taught but when.

For much of the past decade, specialised education in India was something professionals pursued after earning a degree—a correction rather than a foundation. Today, students are choosing domain-first undergraduate programmes at eighteen and postgraduate programmes centred on a single industry rather than general management. They are making that choice after observing the outcomes achieved by the cohorts before them.

This places considerable responsibility on specialised institutions. A school that teaches only what recruiters need this quarter will produce graduates who are employable today but outdated tomorrow. Depth is what makes professionals adaptable, and the ability to understand why markets behave as they do will always outlast any particular modelling technique. Institutions that sacrifice this depth for placement statistics are not building careers; they are merely securing first jobs.

Which is precisely why this has never been a contest with universities.

Each system contributes something the other cannot easily replicate. Universities provide academic depth, research infrastructure and the intellectual patience that transforms knowledge into judgement. Specialised institutions offer practitioner faculty, live industry engagement, rapidly evolving curricula and hiring networks that function as markets rather than placement cells. Neither can give students everything. Together, they can.

The most encouraging development in Indian higher education is the growing collaboration between the two, with institutions embedding industry credentials into formal degree programmes and integrating applied learning within an academic framework. Students graduate with both intellectual depth and industry readiness, without compromising either.

India has improved graduate employability from 46.2 per cent in 2022 to 56.35 per cent in 2026. That is significant progress achieved at scale, and it deserves recognition. Yet it is not enough for an economy whose skills requirements are evolving faster than ever. The specialised institutions that emerged to bridge this gap are not competing with the education system. They are part of it, adapting alongside universities to meet the demands of a more complex and rapidly changing world.

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