“Stop Studying After Class 12”: Ace Investor Saurabh Mukherjea Says Middle-Class India Getting College Wrong
The best earners in India may not be graduates, but those who finish Class 12 and then stop studying.
That is the blunt argument made by Saurabh Mukherjea, Founder and CIO of Marcellus Investment Managers, in a recent podcast, where he questioned the value India’s education system is adding to young people entering the workforce.
Mukherjea said India’s education model is still built around “rote learning”, or as he put it, “ratta maaro and regurgitate in the exam”. According to him, this approach is not preparing students for a world shaped by AI, electric vehicles, biotech, clean tech and advanced science.
“Forget AI, we can see in the data itself,” Mukherjea said, arguing that India’s graduate unemployment numbers show the depth of the problem. “Out of every 100 graduates coming out of college, only three are getting a job in the year of their graduation,” he said.
He added that the unemployment rate for graduates is around 30-40%, compared with about 3% for illiterate people. “You are better off in India not going to university,” Mukherjea said, calling the university system a process of “rattafication” rather than skill-building.
The problem, he argued, begins even before college. “Even your schooling years are not spent thinking. Even the schooling system focuses on ratto and regurgitate,” he said. The result, according to Mukherjea, is that India is struggling to build capacity in frontier sectors. “Na toh hum AI mein hain, na EV mein, na biotech mein, na clean tech mein,” he said.
Mukherjea said Indian employers are effectively signalling that a college degree is not adding enough value. He cited his book *Breakpoint* to say that some of the best earners in India are people who finish Class 12 and then stop studying.
His sharpest example came from Mumbai’s labour market. A graduate chasing an air-conditioned office job, he said, may earn less than someone working on a construction site. “A construction worker will earn twice as much,” he said, adding that a JCB operator can earn even more.
For Mukherjea, this is not just an education problem but an economic one. If India wants to compete in the modern world, he said, the system will have to move away from memorisation and start teaching young people how to think.
