Dr. Ramakrishnan Raman, Vice Chancellor, Symbiosis International (Deemed University).
By Dr. Ramakrishnan Raman, Vice Chancellor, Symbiosis International (Deemed University)
A university education has traditionally been measured by what a student has learned, by the examinations passed, the credits earned and, ultimately, the degree received, yet perhaps higher education should be asking a more fundamental question: what has the student actually built?
Imagine two students graduating with strikingly similar academic records, both having studied marketing, finance, strategy and leadership, both able to explain the underlying theories with confidence. Yet one of them has also launched a small venture, developed a product, managed a live service or worked through an actual business problem from start to finish. The difference is profound, because one has demonstrated knowledge while the other has experienced what it means to turn knowledge into action.
There is a fundamental difference between understanding something intellectually and living through it in practice. A student can study customer segmentation in a classroom and answer an exam question about it with ease, yet the moment that same student must identify real customers, understand their needs and respond honestly to their objections, the idea becomes something entirely more alive. The same holds true for operations, where process design and capacity management take on an entirely different weight once a student becomes responsible for actually delivering a service. A delayed delivery, an unhappy customer or a sudden breakdown in coordination teaches lessons no textbook can fully reproduce.
This is the power of experiential learning, and it rests on one characteristic the classroom cannot replicate: the real world pushes back. A business plan can look flawless until the first customer rejects it outright, a carefully designed service process can fail the instant demand rises, and a team strategy can quickly run into conflicting personalities no diagram anticipated. None of this is a failure of education. These are, in fact, among its most valuable moments.
When students build something themselves, they are forced to make decisions with incomplete information, and through this they learn to sit with ambiguity rather than avoid it. They make mistakes, receive feedback, revise their assumptions and try again, slowly coming to understand the real consequences of their own decisions. Through this repeated process, knowledge gradually becomes capability.
For this reason, experiential learning should not be treated as an occasional activity bolted onto a conventional curriculum, but should become integral to what it means to learn at a university. Students should learn not only from professors and textbooks, but from organisations, entrepreneurs, communities and practitioners, and from one another.
A genuinely multidisciplinary environment opens enormous possibilities. Management students can collaborate with technology students to build real solutions, design students can work with entrepreneurs to turn ideas into products, and researchers can partner with organisations to convert knowledge into practical outcomes. In such an environment, the university becomes a place where knowledge is tested, ideas are challenged and impact is genuinely felt.
None of this means every student must become an entrepreneur, because building can take many forms: a prototype, a piece of usable research, a managed service, a marketing campaign, a social-impact intervention or a genuine operational problem solved from start to finish. The common thread is not entrepreneurship but agency the chance to experience the full journey from identifying a problem to seeing a response meet the real world.
This can be embedded progressively into the university experience. Early on, students can observe problems and attempt simple solutions; later, they can work directly with organisations and communities; and eventually, they can take on complex interdisciplinary projects where the problem itself is ambiguous and must be discovered, tested and refined.
This also demands a serious rethink of assessment. If education is truly about capability, it cannot focus only on what students remember. It should also evaluate what they can create, execute, analyse and learn from, so that a portfolio of meaningful work stands alongside the transcript.
When students build something themselves, they develop a different kind of confidence not the confidence of answering a difficult exam question, but the confidence that comes from confronting a real problem and discovering they can do something about it. A student who has built a product understands customers differently. One who has delivered a service understands responsibility differently. One who has failed genuinely understands resilience differently. These experiences stay with a person for a long time.
This is where experiential learning stops being merely a technique and becomes a philosophy of education. The purpose of a university should not simply be to ensure students leave knowing more, but that they leave capable of doing more.
Imagine a graduating student carrying, beyond the degree certificate, a portfolio of things that actually created a product, a venture, a research solution, a social initiative and being able to say, simply, "I built this." Those three words represent knowledge converted into action, theory tested against reality, and ideas transformed into outcomes.
Perhaps this is what the future of higher education should aspire to: not merely giving students something to study, but giving them meaningful opportunities to build, experiment, fail, learn and create. Because when students build something for themselves, they do not merely learn about the world. They discover that they have the capability to shape it.
