We have all met the student who took Science in Classes 11 and 12 — two years of Physics and Calculus — and then turned to a B.Com degree or chartered accountancy, or finance. Many of them do not merely cope. They actually outperform the very students who studied Commerce all along. Now, reverse it. Have you ever met a Commerce student who finished Class 12 and then moved into Science or Engineering and throve? Ask any college teacher this question and watch them pause.
This is not an accident of talent but a verdict on how we teach Commerce, from the school bench to the B.Com degree. This is not a story about intelligence. Science students are not born cleverer. It is that we have built a one-way street and the direction of the traffic is telling us something we would rather not hear: that years of Commerce education can be surrendered without losing much. When a subject can be skipped and picked up later easily, we are entitled to ask what those years actually contained. The honest answer is uncomfortable. We are teaching Commerce as a dictionary, not as a discipline.
This memory has stayed with me for 40 years. In school, we were taught 10 definitions of “What is business?”, each from a different author, to be reproduced in the answer sheet with the right name attached, each worth a mark. We memorised them and forgot them by the next term. Not one taught me what business actually is.
Just three questions
This is because business, stripped of the dictionary, is three plain questions. What are we selling? Whom are we selling it to? How do we make money doing it? A child running a lemonade stand grasps all three by instinct. Yet, a Commerce student can clear two years of schooling, score well, and never once be made to sit with those three questions in plain language. The foundation is poured in definitions — of business, of a company, of a share or of a bond — recited and ranked, but rarely understood.
This is our definition culture: the habit of mistaking the naming of a thing for the knowing of it. It t does not stop at school. It hardens. By the time a student reaches B.Com, whole subjects have been reduced to bullet points — the “features” of a company, the “advantages and disadvantages” of a business form, the “characteristics” of an instrument … A young Indian can earn a degree in commerce and never once have built a simple model of how a real business earns, spends, and survives. We spend three more years polishing the same recall and call it higher education.
This is not one teacher’s grievance. The country keeps the receipts. Commerce is one of India’s largest fields of study. Around 44 lakh students are enrolled at the undergraduate level (AISHE 2021-22). It is a vast pipeline. Here is what comes out at the other end. According to the India Skills Report, fewer than half of the B.Com graduates were assessed as employable in 2024. We take one of our biggest streams of young people, run them through a decade of Commerce education, and almost one in two emerges unfit for the jobs the economy actually offers.
Compare the company they keep. Management graduates score around 78% on the same employability test; Science graduates clear 58%. Commerce — the subject built expressly to prepare people for business — trails the Science students who could walk into it uninvited. That is not a skills gap. It is a teaching gap and we have been calling it the student’s fault for far too long.
Here is the deeper point. Science education, whatever its faults, trains one muscle above all: reasoning from first principles. You are not asked to memorise why an object falls; you are asked to derive it. That muscle is portable. It walks easily into finance because, underneath the jargon, finance is reasoning about money, risk and reward. Commerce education, as we run it, trains the opposite muscle: recall. This does not travel and serves the student poorly the moment the subject demands real thinking.
So, the one-way street is a verdict. Our science streams, for all their pressure, are building thinkers. Our Commerce streams, for all their popularity, are too often building reciters. A country that wants to be the world’s accountants, analysts and financial back-office cannot keep handing its young a Commerce foundation they can afford to forget.
The repair is cheap. The will is the cost. We do not need 10 definitions of business. What we need is one good question asked well. Put any enterprise in front of a child — a kirana store, a cab aggregator, a bank — and ask: what is being sold, to whom, how is the money made? Teach a share not as a line to be memorised but as a slice of ownership in exactly that enterprise. Teach a balance sheet not as a format to reproduce but as the honest story of what a business owns and what it owes. The National Education Policy already demands this turn; away from rote memorisation towards “how to think”. The intent exists on paper. What remains is to carry it into the Commerce classroom, where it is needed most and felt least.
The problem has never been our students. The problem is that we keep agreeing to be their ceiling when our only job is to be the floor. Reverse the one-way street. Teach Commerce as a way of thinking, not a list of things to name and the traffic, in time, will start moving both ways.
The writer is founder, Sanjay Saraf Educational Institute.
Published – July 03, 2026 10:00 am IST
