Is India a super-competitive place for youth?

I recently read somewhere that India is a super-competitive place for youth. Everything is so difficult. There are 2.5 crore babies born in the country in a year. If you want to succeed in any sphere, you need to compete with all these people. JEE is so difficult, NEET is so difficult, and so on. And of course, this leads to stress, anxiety and other mental health issues.

Is it really true? On the face of it, yes, of course. We have a serious shortage of quality education opportunities. For 2.5 crore babies born, only 2.5 lakh of them will get to really good quality college education like IITs, Ashoka, BITS, NIDs, and so on. To be in the top 1 percent of the population is not easy in such a large group.

But what if I change my goal to be in the top 2 percent. Is it still difficult?

And the answer is surprisingly in negative. There are enough decent quality institutions in India where getting admission is relatively easy. You have to invest time and effort in finding places which are not so well known, visit them personally and select one of them and take admission. (JK Lakshmipat University is one such example.)

After getting admission, make sure that you divide your time between academics and fun judiciously. And you do take your academics seriously. The interesting part of Indian education is that a very large number of students copy assignments and even projects. The universities compete with each other in providing simple question papers with lots of options in exams. The lab exams are a joke and neither students nor faculty take academics seriously. 

Every student entering colleges have been told numerous times that they needed to do hard work only in 11th and 12th class and then the life will be easy. They have done that, and now expect life to be easy which means that they should not have to work hard in college. This attitude and the quality of faculty implies, to take an example from Computer Science education, that 98-99 percent students don't even learn to write good quality 500-lines of code. So, if you want to be in the top 2 percent of the country, the only thing you need to do is to teach yourself quality coding and pass all courses. And this only means that write a few programs yourself over the four years of college. And at least in Computer Science, you can learn all this on your own through online courses even if the faculty in your college is not upto the mark.

Now, if you can be in the top 2 percent of the country (at least at the time of exit from college) by simply doing all the programming yourself (and not copy), would you call this super-competitive education. I won't.

I think India is the easiest country to build a career. Nowhere else in the world it would take so little to be in the top 2 percent.

 

Marketing by Universities: What should parents do?

All my life, I have been in institutions where marketing was taboo. I had, of course, seen ads in print, on TV, on hoardings and in magazines, and often wondered the utility of these. Do people really take the most important decision of their career by looking at the ads. And once I joined the private sector myself, I realize that the answer to this question is an unambiguous YES. Even the NAAC accreditation team that visited JK Lakshmipat University last year wrote amongst its suggestions that we do greater amount of marketing so that more students are aware of the excellent opportunities that we provide.

I am told that advertisement revenue from education sector is greater than almost all other sectors in the country. Most private colleges spend more than 10 percent of their revenue on marketing and the total spend is more than a billion USD. That is a lot of money which could have been used to improve the quality of education.

Marketing is, of course, essential in any business and it is essential that universities reach out to potential students and tell them about its strengths. Only a few top universities can avoid marketing and depend purely on word of mouth. My concern is whether there is too much focus on marketing, too much money being spent on marketing which could have been spent on improving education, and whether the potential students and parents are taking decisions based on what they see in advertisements or do they only shortlist based on marketing and then try to get additional information before taking the final decision.

Taking decisions based on marketing is ok and perhaps the only way to buy a lot of goods and services. It is alright to buy a TV based on the ad that you saw. The maximum loss is that perhaps another TV would have given you a better value. In that sense, you perhaps took a small loss at the most. Same is true for most things. But education is different. Choosing one program over another, or one university over another, could impact your entire career. Choosing a program at a university only based on the highest package advertised by the university could mean a poor job at the end of your program while in another university, you could have done so much better.

Also, unlike most goods and services where it is very difficult for a lay person to compare the offerings, in the education field, it is not too difficult to get a sense of quality offered by different universities if you invest your time into it. Not trivial, but not impossible even for a layman. Marketing essentially assumes that all customers have very limited amount of time in which they want to decide and hence if certain messaging can be communicated a few times consistently, the customers will respond to it. And, for most goods and services, as we said above, it is ok. But it is not ok, if the consequences are very serious.

How many people will buy their homes based on advertisements. I would guess, very few. Advertisements can at best tell them about the potential projects, but they will visit a lot of places, want to see a model apartment, may be visit multiple times with their families and friends, talk to people living there in the neighborhood, and so on. Isn't college education more important than that. College education will determine whether you can buy that property or not in future. So, one needs to spend even more time to decide college education than buying a property.

I sincerely hope that students and parents will use advertisements only for shortlisting the top few choices (say, 6-8) and then get more information about them and there is no shortcut to actually visiting the university, talking to current students and faculty randomly (not the guys in admissions office), ask a lot of questions, see the facilities. Yes, it can be time consuming and if one is looking for universities outside the home town, there is additional expense of travel, but this is the most important decision of your career, and you should at least do as much due diligence as you would do in buying a property.