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A full-page advertisement in the Times of India on 27 July announced a four-year eBBA (Honours) degree from IIM Jammu, developed with the Accenture Centre of Advanced Studies. At the centre of the advertisement was a neat division: 60 per cent academic component from IIM Jammu and 40 per cent industry-led learning from Accenture.
The official programme website makes the same distinction. It describes 60 per cent of the programme as academic delivery by IIM Jammu and 40 per cent as industry exposure through Accenture. It says that learning will be shaped by industry needs, practical tools and business challenges, so that graduates are not merely academically qualified but prepared for the world of work. The degree itself will be awarded by IIM Jammu.
This is more than a division of teaching responsibility. It is a redistribution of epistemic authority within the degree. Put simply, epistemic authority is the authority to decide what counts as worthwhile knowledge, which questions matter, what evidence should be accepted, how claims are tested and what a graduate must understand before receiving a degree.
The advertisement deserves attention because it expresses a wider change in the way universities are beginning to describe themselves. The university is no longer presented as the institution responsible for the intellectual coherence of the entire degree. It supplies one part of the programme, while industry supplies another, supposedly more practical and more closely connected to reality.
A degree
A degree is not simply a collection of lectures, projects, internships and certifications. The university is saying that the graduate has acquired a coherent body of knowledge, reached an appropriate level of understanding and demonstrated that achievement through standards the institution is willing to defend.
The National Higher Education Qualifications Framework describes a bachelor’s degree as the application of a “broad and coherent body of knowledge and skills” across a range of contexts. It defines a programme as the entire scheme of study leading to a qualification and places responsibility on curriculum-designing bodies to ensure that programme outcomes meet the relevant qualification standard. Those outcomes include disciplinary knowledge, critical thinking, judgement, employment and responsible citizenship.
This is important because academic does not mean classroom-based, theoretical or taught only by a career academic. An internship can be academic. A live company project can be academic. A practitioner can teach an academically serious course, just as a professor can teach an intellectually weak one. The question is not where the learning takes place or who delivers it, but how it has been constituted as part of the degree.
Academic and industry-led are not comparable categories. Academic describes the character and standards of the education. Industry-led describes who has influence over its content or delivery. The university may share teaching. It may invite practitioners into the curriculum and allow industry partners to propose problems, projects and technologies. It may even develop parts of the curriculum jointly. What it cannot do is divide away its responsibility for the intellectual integrity of the whole qualification.
The false separation between academia and the “real world”
Traditional degrees are described as theory-heavy, classroom-bound and academic. Industry-linked programmes are described as practical, applied and connected to the real world. The attraction of the second category depends on the apparent weakness of the first.
Universities can teach badly. Curricula can become outdated, assessment can reward memory rather than thought, and students can complete courses without learning how knowledge changes the way a problem is understood. These are serious failures, but they are failures of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. They are not caused by the academic character of a degree.
The use of the phrase “real world” implies that academic study takes place outside reality and that industry is required to bring reality into the degree. Research on work-integrated learning has shown how this language itself creates the theory–practice divide it claims to solve. Ville Björck argues that when universities repeatedly speak of theory and practice as separate worlds, students come to see academic knowledge as something detached from professional action rather than as a means of understanding it.
Industry does not, in fact, offer a theory-free encounter with reality. Every business practice rests on ideas about people, markets, organisations, technology, causation and value. Some of these ideas are explicit. Others are buried inside routines, measures, templates, software platforms and accepted ways of working.
When a company decides how to measure productivity, it is working with a particular idea of productive work. When it segments consumers, it is making assumptions about human behaviour. When it recommends a strategy, it is advancing a view of what causes competitive advantage. When it deploys artificial intelligence, it is making choices about efficiency, evidence, responsibility and the division of judgement between human beings and machines.
These practices are not less theoretical because the theory remains unstated. They may simply be based on theories that have not been examined.
The academic task is to make those assumptions visible. A student should learn not only how a company performs an activity, but why it does so, what evidence supports the practice, under what conditions it works and when it may fail. The student should also be able to ask who benefits from the practice, who carries its risks and whether a different framing of the problem would produce a different answer.
Without this intellectual work, industry exposure can become an introduction to the current habits of organisations. It can teach students how work is presently done without giving them the knowledge needed to judge whether it should be done that way.
The answer to poor academic education is therefore not to reduce the academic share of the degree. It is to make the whole degree more academically serious. Practice should not be placed outside academic learning; it should be turned into an object of disciplined inquiry.
Industry knowledge is valuable, but it is partial
Industry possesses valuable knowledge that universities often lack. A practitioner may understand a supply chain, financial system, technology platform or consumer market in ways that a career academic does not. There is no reason for a university to ignore this knowledge. Academic authority does not imply that professors possess all relevant wisdom.
Industry knowledge, however, is situated knowledge. It is produced within a particular organisation, sector, business model, technology, client base and set of commercial priorities. A manufacturer, hospital, regulator, public administration, family business, cooperative or social enterprise may define future readiness differently. Workers may understand an organisation differently from its senior leadership, and communities affected by a business decision may define its success differently from the consultants advising the company.
This is precisely why the university has a continuing role. Its purpose is not simply to reproduce the perspective of one economic actor more efficiently. It must place that perspective alongside other forms of knowledge and expose it to historical, economic, scientific, legal, social and ethical examination.
Ronald Barnett argues that universities operate in a world where several competing frameworks claim to explain reality. In such a world, the university’s task is not merely to pass on settled answers. It must help people understand competing claims, develop new ways of framing problems and act responsibly where certainty is unavailable.
Industry can explain how a part of the existing world works. The university must also help students understand how that world came into being, what assumptions hold it together, whose interests it serves and how it might be changed. When industry is treated as the natural source of relevance, the university gives up part of this responsibility.
Relevance is not a neutral fact. Knowledge may be relevant to a company’s immediate staffing needs, to a student’s first job, to a lifetime of professional practice, to public policy, to democratic citizenship or to the social consequences of management decisions. These forms of relevance may overlap, but they are not the same.
An employer can reasonably say which capabilities it currently values. It cannot be given final authority to decide what education the student will need as a professional, citizen and human being. A university must consider a longer time horizon and a wider set of obligations.
From employment as an outcome to employability as the purpose
Universities increasingly describe students as talent, curricula as collections of competencies and degrees as career pathways. Learning is translated into skills, certifications, projects and experiences that can be displayed to employers.
There is nothing wrong with wanting graduates to find good work. Universities cannot be indifferent to the economic futures of their students. Employment is an important outcome of a degree. The problem begins when employability moves from being one outcome of education to becoming the organising purpose of education. Once that happens, every part of the curriculum is asked to justify itself by showing how directly it improves a student’s value in the labour market.
Rebecca Boden and Maria Nedeva describe this as a shift in the relationship between universities and employment. Universities once treated graduate employment as one part of their relationship with the labour market, while retaining considerable discretion over educational purpose. Under the employability agenda, producing employable graduates becomes a performance demanded of the university itself, shifting power towards employers and influencing curriculum and pedagogy.
Andreas Fejes identifies a related change from the language of employment to that of employability. Employment directs attention towards whether work exists, how it is organised and how opportunity is distributed. Employability directs attention towards whether the individual possesses the qualities needed to obtain work. Responsibility gradually moves from the structure of the economy to the attributes of the person seeking employment.
This changes the way failure is understood. When graduates do not find suitable work, the explanation can be framed as a shortage of skills, practical exposure, confidence, communication, resilience or personal branding. Questions about the quality and availability of work, employer behaviour and the structure of the labour market become less visible.
Wheelahan, Moodie and Doughney describe a related tendency as the “skills fetish”: the belief that complex economic and social problems can be solved by identifying and supplying the correct set of skills. Their argument is not that skills are unimportant. It is that skills cannot be separated from the bodies of knowledge, institutional arrangements, labour conditions and relations of power that give them meaning.
Slaughter and Rhoades locate this development within a broader academic-capitalist knowledge regime. As universities become more closely tied to markets, knowledge is increasingly organised around economic exchange, commercial networks and the requirements of external actors. The change does not simply add market activity to the university; it begins to reshape teaching, institutional behaviour and ideas about what knowledge is for.
This is the deeper vocationalisation of higher education. Vocationalisation does not mean that students learn useful or practical things. Practical knowledge can be demanding, valuable and intellectually serious. It means that the worth of education is increasingly judged by how efficiently it prepares a person for an economic function that already exists or is currently anticipated.
The student is trained to fit a role, and the role is defined by present demand. The student’s value then becomes closely tied to the continuing value of that function. When technology changes, the student must reskill; when the occupation changes, the student must reposition; and when the function disappears, the student must find another way to demonstrate usefulness.
Adaptability is clearly necessary, but there is a difference between educating a person who can continue learning and creating a system in which individuals remain permanently responsible for proving their economic relevance. In the second model, the economy’s needs are treated as given, while the individual must repeatedly reshape himself or herself to fit them.
Education then begins to mirror the structure of industry. The person is developed as a component within a larger productive system. Success is measured by the quality of the fit, even though the system itself remains outside serious examination.
Why theoretical knowledge still matters
Leesa Wheelahan argues that access to theoretical knowledge is a matter of social justice. A curriculum organised mainly around occupational tasks may prepare students to perform in familiar settings, but it may not provide access to the concepts through which wider professional and social debates are conducted. Students can become competent within a context without gaining the knowledge needed to understand, question or move beyond it.
Michael Young and Johan Muller make a related case for what they call powerful knowledge. This is systematic and specialised knowledge that allows students to move beyond what they can learn from immediate experience alone. It gives them access to explanations, methods and ways of thinking that may challenge the assumptions of the world they already know.
This is especially important for students who do not come from privileged social and professional backgrounds. A well-connected student may gain broad reading, confidence, professional networks and exposure to influential ideas outside the formal curriculum. A less privileged student is more dependent on what the institution itself teaches.
If the formal curriculum is narrowed to tools, certifications and workplace tasks, inequality may deepen. Some students will continue to receive the knowledge and intellectual confidence needed to understand and shape systems. Others will be prepared mainly to operate within them.
Theory matters because it creates distance from the immediate situation. It allows students to distinguish a principle from a local convention, an explanation from a slogan and a causal claim from a convenient correlation. It enables them to ask whether an organisation’s definition of a problem is the only possible definition.
A live project may show how a company approaches a market. Academic study should help students ask whether the market has been defined correctly, what evidence supports the segmentation and what consequences follow from the chosen strategy. An internship may show how employee performance is measured, while academic inquiry should help students examine what the measure includes, what it excludes and how it changes behaviour.
A technology workshop may teach students what an artificial intelligence system can do. A degree must go further by enabling them to understand the assumptions built into the system, the limits of its evidence and the consequences of shifting judgement from people to machines.
Practice supplies the situation. Academic knowledge makes that situation open to thought. Reducing academic knowledge in the name of relevance does not free students from abstraction; it can leave them enclosed within the assumptions of the practices they have been shown.
The student is not only a future employee
The argument is ultimately about the kind of person a degree is meant to educate. Gert Biesta distinguishes between three broad purposes of education: qualification, socialisation and subjectification. Qualification concerns what a person knows and can do. Socialisation concerns entry into existing practices and institutions. Subjectification concerns the development of a person capable of independent judgement and responsible action, rather than someone who is merely shaped by external expectations.
An industry-led programme may be strong in qualification. It can teach tools, technologies and professional procedures. It may also be strong in socialisation by introducing students to corporate language, workplace expectations and accepted ways of solving organisational problems.
The more difficult question concerns subjectification. Where does the student learn to stand at a distance from the organisation and judge it? Where does the student gain the confidence to question the way a client, manager or industry expert has framed a problem? Where does the student learn that an efficient decision can still be unjust, or that a profitable practice may impose costs on people who possess little power over the decision?
These questions must be present inside the company project, the internship, the technology laboratory and the business case. Otherwise, academic education becomes an abstract discussion of values, while practical learning proceeds without serious intellectual or moral scrutiny. A management graduate will eventually make decisions affecting employees, consumers, suppliers, communities, investors and the environment. These decisions allocate opportunity, authority, risk and harm. Management education therefore has a public purpose even when it leads to employment in a private company.
UNESCO makes a similar argument in its report on the futures of education. It presents education as a public endeavour and a common good, grounded in human dignity, social justice, care, reciprocity and solidarity. These are not optional additions to employment preparation; they are part of the reason education exists.
A person is not well educated simply because he can raise productivity. He must also be able to ask what kind of work is being made more productive and at whose cost. A person is not well educated simply because she can influence consumer behaviour. She must also understand when influence becomes manipulation. A university does not fulfil its purpose by producing efficient participants in the economy; it must also educate people who can form a judgement about the economy in which they participate.
Where collaboration becomes abdication
In the case of the stated advertisement, the promise is clear. IIM Jammu supplies academic strength, while Accenture supplies industry learning, current practice and readiness for work. The university authenticates the qualification, and the company authenticates its relevance. That division is precisely the problem. It suggests that academic education cannot itself contain practice, application and professional judgement. Instead, the academic occupies one portion of the degree and industry occupies another.
This is where collaboration begins to become abdication. The university steps back from its position as the intellectual author of the entire qualification and becomes one provider within a larger employability product. It continues to award the degree, but the authority to decide what is relevant is shared with an organisation whose purpose and obligations are different.
A degree must be 100 per cent academic. This does not mean 100 per cent theory. It means that every part of the degree must be governed by a coherent intellectual purpose and remain subject to academic standards, critical inquiry and institutional accountability. The university can share delivery, but it cannot share away responsibility. It can seek industry’s expertise, but it cannot outsource its judgement about what knowledge matters, what purposes the degree should serve and what kind of person the programme seeks to educate.
References
- IIM Jammu. “IIM Jammu eBBA (Honours): Four-Year Degree Programme.”
https://edegrees.iimj.ac.in/online-bba/ - University Grants Commission. National Higher Education Qualifications Framework. Government of India, 2023.
https://www.ugc.gov.in/pdfnews/2990035_Final-NHEQF.pdf - Björck, Ville. “Taking Issue with How the Work-Integrated Learning Discourse Ascribes a Dualistic Meaning to Graduate Employability.” Higher Education, 82, 307–322, 2021.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-020-00650-y - Barnett, Ronald. “University Knowledge in an Age of Supercomplexity.” Higher Education, 40(4), 409–422, 2000.
https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1004159513741 - Boden, Rebecca, and Maria Nedeva. “Employing Discourse: Universities and Graduate ‘Employability’.” Journal of Education Policy, 25(1), 37–54, 2010.
https://doi.org/10.1080/02680930903349489 - Fejes, Andreas. “Discourses on Employability: Constituting the Responsible Citizen.” Studies in Continuing Education, 32(2), 89–102, 2010.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0158037X.2010.488353 - Wheelahan, Leesa, Gavin Moodie and James Doughney. “Challenging the Skills Fetish.” British Journal of Sociology of Education, 43(3), 475–494, 2022.
https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2022.2045186 - Slaughter, Sheila, and Gary Rhoades. Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State, and Higher Education. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
https://books.google.com/books/about/Academic_Capitalism_and_the_New_Economy.html?id=Y-mISmAUa38C - Wheelahan, Leesa. Why Knowledge Matters in Curriculum: A Social Realist Argument. Routledge, 2012.
https://www.routledge.com/Why-Knowledge-Matters-in-Curriculum-A-Social-Realist-Argument/Wheelahan/p/book/9780415522007 - Young, Michael, and Johan Muller. “On the Powers of Powerful Knowledge.” Review of Education, 1(3), 229–250, 2013.
https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3017 - Biesta, Gert. “Risking Ourselves in Education: Qualification, Socialization, and Subjectification Revisited.” Educational Theory, 70(1), 89–104, 2020.
https://doi.org/10.1111/edth.12411 - International Commission on the Futures of Education. Reimagining Our Futures Together: A New Social Contract for Education. UNESCO, 2021.
https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000379707
