For decades, students from India's Tier-II and Tier-III cities were viewed as being at a disadvantage compared to their peers in metropolitan centres. Affordable internet access, online education and remote work are beginning to narrow that divide, but a different gap remains.
According to Rohit Gupta, Co-Founder & COO of College Vidya, while knowledge has become more accessible than ever before, awareness, exposure and professional networks continue to shape who gets ahead in the job market.
Here are excerpts from his conversation with EdexLive on the matter:
There has long been a perception that students from Tier-II and Tier-III cities are at a disadvantage compared to their metro counterparts. Do you think that gap is narrowing today? What trends are driving this shift?
For many years, students from India's Tier-II and Tier-III cities were seen as being behind students from the big cities. Today that gap is becoming smaller. The main reason is access. A student in a smaller Indian city can now watch the same online lectures, use the same learning tools, and apply for the same remote jobs as a student in Delhi or Mumbai.
Affordable smartphones and cheap internet data made this possible. This is also why many of India's smaller towns now make up a large share of the country's online education enrolments. The one thing that is still unequal is exposure. A student in a big city often grows up knowing what career options exist. A student in a smaller town may have to find this out without much guidance.
So in India today, knowledge has become almost equal for everyone, but awareness has not. Closing that awareness gap is the next big step for the country.
Are employers changing the way they evaluate talent today, and opening the doors to graduates from smaller towns?
Employers in India are starting to change how they judge talent, but this is happening slowly and only in some places. Newer companies have changed the fastest. They hire people based on the work they can show, not on the name of their college, and they look carefully at what a candidate can actually do. Remote work has helped this even more. Once a job no longer needs a person to sit in the office, a candidate from a small Indian town can be hired just as easily as one from a metro city.
Older and larger companies are slower to change. Many of them still judge candidates by the rank of their college and their marks. Because of this, a graduate from a smaller town often has to work harder to prove their ability. The opportunity is now open to them, but it is not yet equal across every company in India.
Even as access improves, employability remains a concern across India. What are the biggest skill gaps that students, especially online learners, still need to address?
Even though access to education has improved across India, getting a good job is still a worry for many students. The technical skills are usually the easier problem to solve, because the internet now teaches most of them at little or no cost. The harder gaps are different ones.
The first gap is communication. Many Indian students can do good work but find it difficult to explain that work clearly. In a job, explaining your work is as important as doing it. The second gap is the ability to work without clear instructions. In college, students are given a fixed question with a known answer. At work, they are given an unclear problem and a deadline.
For online learners, there is one more gap. They are usually good at studying on their own, because no one forces them to study, but many of them have little experience of working in a team. Studying alone and building something with other people are two different skills
Online education offers flexibility that traditional campuses often cannot. How can students use that flexibility strategically to improve their career prospects while pursuing their degree?
Online education gives students a kind of flexibility that a normal college often cannot. Many students use this free time only to relax. The students who do well use it to do more. The change in thinking is simple. A degree should not be seen as the final goal. It should be seen as the starting point.
A normal college takes up most of a student's day through travel and fixed class timings. An online degree returns those hours to the student. The best use of that time is to gain real work experience while studying. A student who finishes a degree along with two years of actual work will usually do better than a student who finishes with only the degree.
There is one honest point to remember. In online learning, nobody reminds the student to begin. That discipline has to come from the student.
Remote internships and online certifications have become far more common in recent years. How important are these opportunities in helping students from non-metro cities compete in the job market?
Both remote internships and online certificates are useful, but they do not carry the same value. An internship is always stronger than a certificate. A certificate only shows that a student watched a course. An internship shows that the student actually did the work. Recruiters in India understand this difference very well. For students from non-metro cities, the remote internship is very important.
Earlier, a student had to move to a big city and pay high rent just to get work experience. Now that experience can reach them at home. There is one point of caution about certificates. There are now too many of them in the market. When every applicant has thirty certificates, they stop meaning much. It is far better for a student to have one real project they can explain in detail than a long list of certificates.
Many students pursuing online degrees worry about visibility and credibility in front of recruiters. What practical steps can they take to build a stronger professional profile?
Many students with online degrees in India worry about how recruiters will see them. The most useful step is to make their work easy to find. A clear LinkedIn profile, a simple portfolio, or a GitHub page is very helpful, because most recruiters search a candidate's name before they call. The student should make sure there is something useful to find. The second step is to get one referral. A single genuine introduction is worth more than sending a hundred applications to companies that do not know you.
Online learners often miss this because they do not have a college campus where they can meet people, so they have to build that network online instead. The last step is just as important. Students should not hide the fact that their degree is online. They should present it with confidence. A student who worked a job and finished a degree at the same time is showing recruiters that they can handle pressure and manage their own time, and that is a real strength.
Traditionally, institutional pedigree played a major role in hiring decisions. Do you think India's hiring ecosystem is moving toward a more skills-first approach, especially with the rise of online education and digital hiring?
India's hiring system is clearly moving towards a skills-first approach. For many years, the name of the college worked as a shortcut for recruiters, because checking the real skill of every candidate was slow and costly. So companies simply trusted the college brand. That shortcut is now becoming weaker. Online tests, digital hiring, and AI-based screening allow a company to check a candidate's skill directly, which matters far more than where that skill was learned. The numbers in India support this change. The number of UGC-recognised universities offering online degrees has grown from 56 in 2021 to more than 110 in 2025, and the rules now treat an online degree as equal to a regular college degree. The college name will not disappear completely. It will simply become a way to choose between two equal candidates, rather than a gate that keeps people out. The college name may still help in a close decision, but it is the skill that finally gets a person the job.
