Rajat spent ₹16.5 lakh on a BTech.
Four years later, he walked out of an interview feeling like he'd learned nothing.
The recruiter asked about Docker, CI/CD, Git workflows.
His syllabus had stopped at Java basics and SQL.
So he did what thousands of Indian engineers now do.
He paid again.
₹70,000 for a bootcamp. Six more months of learning what his degree never taught him.
"It felt like I was paying twice for the same education," he says.
In 2015, a private BTech CS degree cost ₹5-8 lakh.
Today? ₹14-20 lakh in tuition. Add hostel and infra, and premium campuses touch ₹25-30 lakh.
That's a 3-4x jump.
But open the curriculum, and you'll find the same bones from a decade ago:
Colleges have bolted on shiny new names — AI & ML, Data Science, Cybersecurity, IoT.
But experts say many are just new labels stitched onto an old skeleton.
By the time a student graduates, the tools they were promised have already changed twice.
One HR leader put it bluntly:
"Companies still pay for yesterday's role while quietly absorbing weeks of retraining before fresh hires can handle client responsibilities. This isn't just a hiring problem — it's a pricing problem."
And it's not only students bleeding.
A Maharashtra engineering student's family took a ₹75,000 personal loan — on top of her degree fees — just for a coding bootcamp during her sixth semester.
"College and my bootcamp felt like two parallel worlds," she says.
Day: university syllabus.
Night: what companies actually test.
Here's the twist — it's not all doom.
The India Skills Report 2026 puts overall graduate employability at 56.35%, up from 54.81% last year.
That's a near 10-point climb in four years.
CS and IT grads are leading it too, hitting 78-80% employability — proof that when skilling does catch up, it works.
But the gap is real, and families are footing the bill twice.
Once for the degree.
Once for the promise the degree didn't keep.
Not a course. Not a campus.
A promise — that four years and lakhs of rupees will still be worth something the day you graduate.
Right now, for too many students, that promise is quietly expiring before the ink on the degree even dries.
That's all for now!
