We spend years getting students into college. Then we leave them to an algorithm.

We spend years helping students get into college. Families plan early, schools track outcomes, students accumulate activities and internships, and an entire industry has grown around applications, essays, tests, rankings and acceptance rates.

Then the acceptance letter arrives.

And the conversation largely stops.


We have become remarkably sophisticated at helping young people get into college, but far less deliberate about what they should do with the three or four years they spend there. I see this across the spectrum, from students at India's premier institutions and leading international universities to those studying at colleges that rarely feature in rankings.

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The institution may differ. The question is often the same: How do I use these years well?

This matters even more today because students have access to an extraordinary amount of career information. Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn and AI can tell a 19-year-old almost anything about investment banking, consulting, entrepreneurship, technology, design or careers their parents may never have heard of.

The problem is not information. It is knowing how to utilize it efficiently.

A student can watch dozens of videos about entrepreneurship without ever trying to build something. They can follow investment bankers without knowing whether they would enjoy the work. They can ask AI which career suits their personality without having spent enough time discovering what actually motivates them.

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There is no substitute for that experience.

If I were 19 today, I would absolutely use AI. I would use LinkedIn, watch good creators and take advantage of the extraordinary knowledge available online. But I would also deliberately switch it all off sometimes.

I would read about an industry. Speak to five people who actually work in it. Spend time with a professor. Intern at a small organisation where nobody had designed a glamorous programme for me. Or build something. And then discover that I didn't enjoy any of it. I would then go down different rabbit holes to try something else.

I call this the primitive method: read, observe, ask questions, try things and form your own opinion.

It sounds inefficient in a world where an answer is available in seconds. But some inefficiency is valuable. It is through experience that students begin to understand not just what they can do, but what they want to do and what kind of work brings out their best.

We have also started carrying the optimisation mindset of college admissions into college itself. Students arrive thinking about internships, placements, CVs, certifications and what will look good on LinkedIn. Even extracurricular activities are often chosen for their signalling value.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a good job. But college should offer more than preparation for the first one.

By graduation, a student should have done things that challenged them, changed their mind, exposed them to people unlike themselves and made them more capable than when they arrived. They should have built something, explored something, failed at something and discovered something about themselves.

We measure admission very carefully. We measure placements. We measure starting salaries.

Perhaps we should pay equal attention to what happens in between. Because that in between time is what builds genuine self worth and sense of inquisitiveness in a student.

Getting into college is an achievement. What a student does with those years is where the actual education lies. Simply because not all education lies within the framework of a curriculum.