PERCEIVED RETURNS OF HIGHER EDUCATION: A CASE STUDY ON SOME COLLEGE STUDENTS OF JABALPUR

The paper reports the perceived returns of higher education for some first-semester college students of Jabalpur, M.P., India. It followed a previous study that was conducted for class XII students of Siliguri, W.B., India. The findings indicate a more or less similar pattern. In addition, the present paper identifies a gap, as was pointed out by Jensen (2010), between the perceived return of education for the students and the actual potential return. The students preferred subjects like management over science subjects at the graduation level with the hope of getting better job opportunities. It has been opined based on conceptual analysis that the contemporary market is heading towards Gig-economy that promotes project-based short-term employment which has the threat of uncertainty and at the same time has the advantage of flexibility. This job-market situation calls for nurturing critical thinking, life-skill development with an emphasis on professional collaboration, the approach of an entrepreneur and life-long learning. It has been suggested that among several options, the active learning strategy and the concept-point-recovery (CPR) approach (Cho, Melloch and Levesque-Bristol, 2021), change from a surface-learning approach to a deep-learning approach and vice-versa (Xie, Zhang and King,2022) and maintaining appropriate learning environment may be effective (Ahmed, Taha, Alneel and Gaffar,2018).