PM's economic advisor Sanjeev Sanyal says UPSC 'waste of time', questions exam-centric education in AI age

Sanyal is a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council

• Sanjeev Sanyal says UPSC exams for job stability are now a waste of time
• He argues AI and tech make traditional curricula and test studying less relevant
• Skills now outpace university curricula due to rapid tech advancements.

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Economist Sanjeev Sanyal said that pursuing Union Public Service Commission (UPSC) exams for job stability is a complete ‘waste of time’.

While speaking at the ANI podcast, Sanyal said that traditional curriculum and test studying are becoming less important because of changing technologies and AI-driven learning. According to Sanyal, while pursuing degrees and entering government services may have made sense in the 1960s, rapid technological change has fundamentally altered how skills and knowledge are acquired.

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Sanyal is a member of the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council (PM-EAC). He said university education was historically an elite activity and became widespread only in the 20th century. However, he argued that lecture-based teaching is now losing relevance as technology and AI can deliver knowledge more efficiently than traditional classrooms.

“Being a stenographer may have been a good option for somebody in the 1940s, but technology has changed, and it has now become a routine affair," he told ANI.

According to him, skills now evolve far faster than university curricula, while artificial intelligence systems are already more effective at delivering up-to-date knowledge.

“AI will just be vastly superior at delivering cutting-edge knowledge,” Sanyal said, stressing that the problem is not education itself but how learning and skilling are currently organised. Universities, he argued, continue to operate on static models that struggle to keep pace with tools and technologies that change every few months.

He called the issue with AI outpacing traditional college education “a problem for the skilling system".

“There is a collapse between the idea of skilling and tertiary education. Earlier, skilling was seen as something plumbers did, and tertiary education was seen as this place where all the hi-fi went and did some great philosophical intellectual upgradation," Sanyal told ANI.

Sanyal also questioned the idea of spending four years in university before entering the workforce. According to him,  people should begin working at 18 and pursue degrees alongside jobs.

“People should get people into jobs early. You should actually think that at 18 people find jobs, and do degrees on the side, the economist added, citing Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu and billionaire Elon Musk," he said.