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India, AI and the shrinking premium of a university education
A degree is looking like a pricey ticket to a lottery that has stopped paying out.
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The premium on college education – the wage bump that graduates enjoy over school-leavers – is shrinking, and AI could further narrow the gap.
PHOTO: AFP
Andy Mukherjee
India has three good reasons to engage with one of the biggest open questions in economics today: the impact of artificial intelligence on jobs.
First, the country has the world’s largest youth population. Second, its growth model has been dominated by software services, and AI tools like Anthropic’s Claude Opus – and Mythos, which has not been publicly released – are getting exceedingly good at writing code and finding bugs. But the third and final point may be the most crucial: The threat to entry-level positions comes amid an alarming oversupply of college graduates.
