The Business of Aspiration

Decoding the Complex Ecosystem of Indian Education

Simar Kaur
Journalism and Mass Communication student, LPU
Email : simarkaurkau@gmail.com

India’s education system is among those rare things that can’t be easily described. It’s at once the stuff of wonder and the stuff of contradiction, a system serving more than 250 million learners, one of the largest education systems on earth, and regularly falling short of the aspirations it promises to represent. It is an understanding of something that is very fundamental to modern India: a country of unflagging ambition running on infrastructure churned out for a bygone era. For most of the 20th century, education in India had been considered as a public good, one that the state has opened a rungs-long ladder to citizens, who have, by their very existence, been denied access to the foot of it. This framing has not completely gone away, but it has slowly usurped a new logic. The statistics speak for themselves.

According to the “Indian Higher Education Reform: From Half-Baked Socialism to Half-Baked Capitalism”, a working paper published by the Center for International Development (CID) at Harvard University. In 1960, only 15% of engineering seats throughout the nation were held by private institutions. This is now 86.4%. Private colleges accounted for 6.8% of total seats in medicine in 1960, and increased to almost 41% in 2003. The project was originally led by the state, and over the years it has gradually been abandoned for decades and is now a huge commercial project. The analysts who examine this change speak of a three-part reality that has emerged as a result: poor-quality government schools at the lower end, government-aided private schools at the middle, and high-end private schools at the top. with amenities such as AC and horseback riding becoming not so much a part of school as a marker of class. The financial barrier between levels is not an incidental dental. It is structural.

This commercialisation has brought pressures which in places burst through in grand fashion. In a popular discourse, the controversies around NEET and other high-stakes entrance exams how the papers were leaked, how the allegations of organized malpractices were made are routinely dismissed as a problem of administration, a problem of corrupt middle-men between exams and opportunity. That’s a superficial diagnosis. These incidents are symptoms of an ecosystem, which is under an intolerable strain. Consider the arithmetic. According to the Business Standard, July 27, 2022 Report Indicates that 90% of Indian students see themselves heading into just four career paths: engineering, medicine, an MBA or a government job. The numbers are soul crushing for anyone seeking a government job 220 million applications for some 722,000 jobs, meaning about one in three hundred gets the job. That kind of a failure rate makes it only natural to want to bend or break the rules when there are 299 ways of failing for every one way of succeeding, it becomes rational, for those inside the system, to want to subvert it, and all too easy to feel that you aren’t failing, you’re trying to survive rationally. There is a psychological axiom known as the “ambiguity effect,” which explains why people prefer a certain chance of winning, even if it is very small, over the uncertainties of a side that hasn’t been beaten before. The students of India are not the only ones who are risk averse. They are reacting – as they should – to a system that has chosen to play with anything but the rules. That’s the irony of the mainstream road – it’s not always the road that’s taken that yields the results on its own terms.

The mismatch between the education provided in school curricula and the needs of employers has been reported in all sectors. The main criticism of the system is for its emphasis on memorisation instead of real skills development and its focus on negative reinforcement of mistakes. Students learn about volcanoes without the education of volcanoes becoming a career in geology. They never meet a working statistician but they learn to calculate from a histogram. This effects the boardroom as well. The president of the Reliance Group has said publicly that the company frequently has to retrain the basics of mechanical and chemical engineering with newly hired graduates, as the degrees graduates often possess have little to do with being ready to work. It fails to regard errors as failures to be punished or processed as information, making one researcher’s words, “educating people out of their creative capacities.”

As Per the report Published in Journal of International Migration and Integration, Springer, 2016. In the face of this confluence of pressures fierce competition, mixed quality, narrow channels – an increasing number of Indian students have decided that it is the most sensible thing to do to get out. The figures of this migration are remarkable. The number of Indian students who have moved internationally has virtually tripled from about 62,000 in 2000 to more than 181,000 in 2013. If we talk about IIE Open Doors Report 2012 / 2013 it indicates that Indian families are spending anywhere between $700 million and $1 billion abroad every year to get their children higher education something that, amazingly, is more than Indian government’s expenditure on higher education in India. Despite the United States as the main destination, with almost 93,000 Indian students as of 2012, the geography of aspirations is changing. The lure of Canada and New Zealand has grown even more compelling, in part due to the ease with which students can find work opportunities after graduation a clear indicator that they are not just looking for a degree, but also considering long-term migration options.

This is not to imply that the Indian education system is falling apart. The situation is actually more complex and more interesting than they let on in the picture. On the global discourse on education, India and China are in the same league – managers of the world’s two largest education systems, both very successful at churning out high-quality technical talent to serve the international knowledge economy. The ultimate institutes of India, especially the Indian Institute of Technology (IITs), are known for their high standards of rigor and have been dubbed as some of the toughest entrance exams in the world by researchers. In fact, first-year engineering students have been seen to manufacture steel parts at the millimetre level by hand, a manufacturing culture similar to that of Japan, which has historically been attentive to exactness. A small but welcome indication that a system is looking outwards, rather than inwards, for its benchmarks is that some secondary schools in India have started teaching Japanese and Chinese as elective languages. And while AI starts to redefine the pedagogical opportunities that can be offered to a large system, India’s educational landscape vast, under strain, with all the paradoxes is one of the world’s greatest exporters of skill, ambition and talent. It remains to be seen if the system that creates that talent can be modified at a fast enough pace to prevent exporting it for necessity, rather than choice.