The degree, unbundled: how India's credit-banking rules are pulling the bachelor's model apart

For a hundred years, the bachelor’s degree was a single, indivisible thing: three or four years, one institution, one credential handed over at the end. That bundle is coming apart. In India the pressure is no longer only from the market. It now comes from the regulator itself.

In November 2024 the University Grants Commission approved guidelines for skill-based courses and micro-credentials that rewrite what a degree can be made of. Nearly two years on, as institutions move from circular to timetable, the practical effect is becoming clear: students can assemble a large share of their qualification from short, credit-linked courses, bank those credits, and redeem them later toward the full award.

What does “unbundling” actually mean?

Unbundling is a term borrowed from economics, where it describes taking a package sold as one unit and selling its parts separately. Applied to higher education, it means separating the jobs a degree has always combined.

Unbundling in higher education

Unbundling in higher education is the separation of a degree’s bundled functions, teaching, credentialing, signalling and networking, into distinct services a student can buy, complete and stack on their own schedule. India’s micro-credential rules and Academic Bank of Credits are its clearest institutional form.

A traditional degree does at least four jobs at once. It teaches content, certifies that you learned it, signals your ability to employers, and connects you to a network. Unbundling pulls those apart. A coding bootcamp teaches and certifies but signals weakly. A brand-name certificate signals strongly but teaches little. What is new in India is that the degree itself is now allowed to be built from these pieces.

How does the Academic Bank of Credits change the degree?

The rules would mean little without the infrastructure to hold the credits, and that is what the Academic Bank of Credits provides. It is a central digital repository, run by UGC under the Ministry of Education, that stores the credits a student earns across different institutions.

Every institution is expected to register its students on the ABC portal and create an APAAR ID , the permanent academic account that ties a learner’s credits together. Because the account is permanent and linked to DigiLocker , a student can leave a programme with a certificate or diploma, then return years later and complete the degree using stored credit. This is the multiple entry-exit model that NEP 2020 promised, now given a working ledger.

These guidelines aim to address the job market’s changing demands and prepare India’s youth to become key contributors to a globally competitive knowledge economy.

UGC Chairman M. Jagadesh Kumar, on the 2024 guidelines

Do employers actually value these credentials?

Policy can permit unbundling, but employers decide whether it pays off. The global demand data is running firmly in its favour. In the Coursera Micro-Credentials Impact Report 2025, based on surveys of more than 1,000 employers and 1,200 students across ten countries including India, 96% of employers said a micro-credential helps a candidate’s application and 85% said they were more likely to hire a candidate who holds one.

Student expectations have moved even faster. In the same report, 94% of students said they wanted micro-credentials embedded in their degree, up from 55% two years earlier. Enrolment behaviour tracks the same line: students were 2.4 times more likely to enrol in a programme when its credential carried academic credit. Credit is the hinge, and it is exactly what India’s ABC framework now supplies.

Why are employers building their own academies?

The other force pulling the degree apart sits outside the university entirely. Large employers, frustrated with what they call a mismatch between graduates and open roles, increasingly train and certify workers themselves. These programmes are shorter, cheaper, and tied to a job at the end.

The pull for the learner is concrete. A role-specific academy can take weeks rather than years, its curriculum maps directly to the work, and it is often free to the learner. For a university, the threat is not that every student leaves. It is that the most employable, career-focused students now have an alternative the traditional degree cannot match on price or speed, unless the degree can absorb that training as banked credit.

Can universities adapt in time?

The policy door is open. The obstacle is institutional machinery. Accreditation processes, examination cycles, and internal budgeting were all built around a fixed three or four-year model. Turning a menu of external skill courses into recognised, credit-bearing components of a degree asks universities to change how they approve, assess and cost teaching, and to do it quickly.

The demand data suggests the market will not wait for slow adopters. When the regulator permits half a degree to be built from micro-credentials, and students say they want exactly that, the gap between what students can now legally bank and what a given university is ready to grant becomes the real story of the next few years.

Conclusion

The degree is not disappearing. In India it is being asked to do its jobs in smaller, faster, bankable pieces, with the UGC’s rules and the Academic Bank of Credits as the scaffolding. Universities that treat unbundling as a threat to resist will keep losing career-focused students to employers and platforms. Those that treat it as a design brief, and rebuild the degree around credit-bearing credentials students can stack, are the ones both the policy and the demand data already favour.