Improving Employment Prospects of Indian College Graduates through Standardized Testing: A Pilot Evaluation

Many Indian students graduate with bachelor's degrees, but are unable to find work. In this project, we propose to evaluate whether providing employers with more detailed information on recent graduates' skills and aptitudes can improve their labor market outcomes. We will work with Aspiring Minds, a firm that tests workers' skills and provides the results of these tests to firms looking to hire workers. In this project, Aspiring Minds will assess the skills of many additional college students. We will randomize (1) whether an individual students' assessment results are given to firms immediately or six months after graduation and (2) the fraction of students at a given college whose results are immediately given to firms. This will allow us to determine whether the benefit of providing information on some students' skills to firms comes at the expense of their classmates' labor market outcomes. If this intervention is successful in boosting job-finding rates among Indian college graduates, we anticipate it will ultimately assist colleges to better tailor their curricula—and students to better target their studies—to improve market-readiness at graduation.