The story South Asia likes to tell about itself is demographic: a young, restless population that will power growth long after East Asia has aged. But behind that story sits a quieter ledger of numbers that do not look like a dividend. Learning assessments show children several years behind grade level. Youth unemployment and underemployment rates remain stubbornly high. Employers complain of skill gaps even as graduates struggle to find work. The pandemic did not create these fractures; it exposed and widened them. A cohort that spent key schooling years online, out of school, or in improvised arrangements is now moving into labour markets that were fragile even before COVID-19. The question is no longer whether South Asia’s education systems are under strain, but whether they can still plausibly claim to be preparing the region for the economy it says it wants.

Learning Loss as Structural, Not Temporary

When schools shut in 2020 and 2021, governments and donors spoke of “learning loss” as if it were a temporary deviation that could be reversed with remedial classes and catch-up programmes. In South Asia, the disruption lasted long enough, and the baseline was weak enough, that the loss has hardened into structure. Household surveys and independent assessments in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh show a pattern that repeats across borders: children in late primary grades who cannot reliably read a simple paragraph, teenagers unable to do basic division, older students who struggle with applied problem-solving.

The digital pivot that was supposed to soften the blow exposed sharp inequalities instead. Urban, middle-class households with multiple devices and stable connections kept some continuity; low-income rural households without smartphones, data or electricity did not. Radio and TV-based initiatives reached some learners but could not replicate the relational, corrective element of face-to-face teaching. For many children, especially girls, school closures were not an interruption but an exit ramp into work, domestic responsibilities or early marriage.

Quantity Versus Quality: The Long Shadow of Expansion

Over the last two decades, South Asia made real progress on basic access. Net enrolment in primary education rose sharply; gender gaps narrowed in many districts; millions more children sat for examinations that their parents never had a chance to take. But systems that were designed, financed and politically rewarded for getting children into school were slower to reorient toward what happened inside classrooms once they arrived.

Class sizes in public schools remain high; teacher absenteeism in some regions is chronic; curricula are dense and exam-driven rather than competency-driven. In parts of India and Pakistan, a growing share of children now attend low-fee private schools that often operate with minimal regulation and highly variable quality. The result is a stratified education landscape in which better-off families hedge their bets through tutoring, private schooling and university placements abroad, while poorer households must trust state systems that have struggled to adapt pedagogy to the needs of first-generation learners.

Cohorts and the Skills Pipeline: Where the System Bends

One way to understand the crunch is to follow a stylised cohort through the system. A child starts primary school with improved odds of enrolment compared with previous generations. By the end of primary, many students can decode text but struggle with comprehension or applied numeracy. In lower secondary, dropout rates rise as the opportunity cost of schooling grows, especially for those from low-income households. For those who persist, upper secondary and tertiary systems are deeply unequal: a narrow elite segment that delivers globally recognised skills, a broader mainstream that supplies degrees of uncertain labour-market value, and a large pool of young people who exit with few formal qualifications at all.

The pandemic cohort passed through these stages with additional disadvantages: long gaps in schooling, family income shocks, psychosocial stress and, in many cases, reduced study time as children helped sustain household livelihoods. Those disadvantages are now being carried into labour markets where informal employment is still the norm and productivity growth has been patchy.

Labour Markets That Cannot Absorb What Schools Produce

South Asia’s education debate often treats schooling and skills as if they were separate from the structure of the labour market. In reality, the two are locked together. Large informal sectors in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and neighbouring economies offer few opportunities for the kind of cumulative skill acquisition that turns basic education into higher productivity and earnings. Young people cycle through casual work, gig roles, unpaid apprenticeships and spells of inactivity that do little to deepen their capabilities.

Employers in formal manufacturing and services, meanwhile, complain of shortages of job-ready candidates, especially in mid-skill technical and supervisory roles. This coexistence of educated unemployment and employer-reported skill gaps is not a paradox; it is the predictable outcome of systems that reward paper qualifications and exam performance more than problem-solving, communication, teamwork or digital fluency. Vocational streams remain small, fragmented and often socially stigmatised. The result is that the bridge between the classroom and the workplace remains narrow and precarious for the majority.

Gender, Class and the Unequal Toll of Disruption

The pandemic’s impact on education was filtered through existing hierarchies. Girls in conservative or low-income households were more likely to see schooling interrupted permanently, especially at the transition to adolescence. Where families faced income loss, sons’ education was often protected at the expense of daughters’. For many young women, the window for returning to formal education once they had left closed quickly.

Class divides deepened too. Urban middle-class students who navigated the disruptions with online tutoring, devices and parental support now compete for places in higher education and formal employment from a position of relative strength. Their peers in rural or precarious urban settings, whose education was interrupted with little backup, carry weaker skills into the same competition. Without targeted support, the risk is that the pandemic cohort will silently harden the region’s existing inequalities of opportunity.

Digital Fixes and Their Limits

In the wake of school closures, ed-tech platforms and digital learning tools were hailed as the future. South Asia has seen a boom in such ventures, from test-prep apps and video lessons to coding bootcamps and online degrees. Some have expanded access and flexibility; many have been absorbed most readily by those who were already better served by the system.

The underlying constraints remain stubborn: patchy connectivity, device sharing within households, limited digital literacy among teachers, and the absence of systematic ways to validate and integrate online learning into recognised credentials. For students without a strong foundational base, an app cannot substitute for the patient, iterative feedback that good teaching provides. Digital solutions are tools — potentially powerful ones — but they do not, on their own, rewrite the incentive structures that shape how and what schools teach.

What Would a Course Correction Look Like?

A serious response to South Asia’s education crunch would focus less on building new slogans and more on shifting three levers: what gets taught in classrooms, how systems measure success, and how education connects to work. Curricula would be pared back to prioritise literacy, numeracy and core reasoning skills in the early years, with explicit remediation for students who fall behind. Teacher training would be refocused on practical pedagogy rather than rote completion of modules. Assessments would move gradually from rewarding memorisation to valuing application and understanding.

At the same time, vocational and technical education would be expanded and de-stigmatised, developed in closer partnership with employers and tied to credible certification frameworks that allow movement between academic and skills-based tracks. Labour-market policies would recognise that first jobs increasingly shape long-term trajectories. Incentives for firms to invest in on-the-job training, apprenticeships and structured career ladders would help turn basic education into genuine human capital rather than a sorting mechanism.

The Cohort That Will Decide the Story

The cohort now in late secondary school, early university and first jobs in South Asia occupies a hinge position. They grew up in systems that had already expanded access but had not fully solved the quality problem. They experienced pandemic disruption at a formative stage. They are entering labour markets marked by climate stress, automation anxiety and slow formal job creation. Whether the region’s demographic narrative still holds — whether its youth become an engine of growth or a reservoir of frustration — will depend less on their numbers than on the institutions that accompany them into adulthood.

The danger is drift: a continuation of pre-pandemic policies with only marginal adjustments, while a whole generation accumulates deficits that are difficult to reverse. The alternative is a deliberate reorientation, treating learning outcomes and school-to-work transitions as central macroeconomic variables rather than social-sector afterthoughts. South Asia’s education crunch is not a story about classrooms alone. It is about the kind of economies these classrooms are preparing — or failing to prepare — people to build.