The DNA of Inclusivity: Why Ashoka University Surprised Me

I had joined Ashoka University in summer, 2025. During my recent winter break, a lot of my friends were curious about my Ashoka experience, and I found myself repeatedly answering one question: "What is the one thing about Ashoka that impresses you most?"

My answer is always the same: Inclusivity is written into the university’s DNA.

I thought I knew Ashoka. I taught the very first batch here; my daughter studied here; I’ve attended many events here. Yet, when I joined full-time in June 2025, I was still stunned by the depth of their commitment. It reminded me of seeing the Taj Mahal for the first time. You can read the descriptions and see the photos, but nothing prepares you for the actual scale of the beauty when you stand before it.

At Ashoka, inclusivity isn't a policy—it’s a lived reality. We believe that any student with demonstrated talent should be able to thrive here, regardless of their background. To achieve this, we focus on two critical pillars: Accessibility and Affordability.

1. Support for All Learners: The Office of Learning Support (OLS)

True inclusivity goes beyond physical ramps. Our Office of Learning Support (OLS) provides comprehensive care for students with a wide range of needs:

• Visible Disabilities: Support for visual, hearing, and locomotor impairments.

• Invisible Disabilities: Specialized assistance for students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and other learning disabilities.

• Holistic Integration: The OLS provides necessary technology, coordinates with Residence Life for specialized housing, and even trains faculty members to adapt their teaching methods for diverse learners.

Furthermore, we anchor the Inclusive University Alliance, a network of institutions working together to ensure these supports become the standard across Indian higher education.

2. Breaking Financial Barriers: A 1,000-Crore Commitment

Ashoka ensures that financial constraints never stand in the way of talent. Since our inception, nearly 50% of our students have received some form of scholarship.

The scale of this support is unprecedented in India:

• The Milestone: In the last 10 years, we have committed over ₹700 crores in scholarships. With our growing student body, that number is set to exceed ₹1,000 crores in the next couple of years.

• The 2026 Batch: We have announced 500 scholarships for the incoming class. While 200 are merit-based, the majority are means-based (and merit scholars are eligible for additional financial aid).

• Full-Ride Support: For many of our students (more than 10% of the cohort), we offer complete tuition waiver. But for some of our students with the greatest financial need, we offer more than just a tuition waiver. We cover tuition, hostel fees, dining, and even provide a stipend for out-of-pocket expenses.

    

I am not aware of any other university in India offering this level of generous, guaranteed support.

If you know a bright student seeking college admission this year—regardless of their financial status or physical needs—please share this with them. For more details on our admissions process and aid, I encourage you to reach out to our admissions team.

Choosing College Program based on Placement or ROI

This is the month when I receive the maximum phone calls or emails or whatsapp messages. Students and parents are confused between various programs and if you ask them for the source of confusion, it is almost always, which program has a marginally higher RoI. I wrote a blog last year on Return on Investment in Education where my thesis was that one should try to figure out what people are doing 5-10 years after graduation and not worry about the first month salary after the graduation. But I think it was a bit complex and talked about too many things. Still if you want to understand RoI thing in more details, do read that.

In this blog, I will take a simple example to show why considering just the first month salary is not a good way to consider RoI. By the way, I am of the opinion that one should never look at RoI in these terms, and should just consider the quality of education in a university, and hope that higher quality education will lead to a good career. But since I can't convince people to not look at fake placement data, let me take a small step and point out some obvious fallacies.

Let us start with the question. You have options to take admission in two different programs. The program 'P1' has the total cost over 4 years as Rs 10 lakhs and the median salary offered last year to graduating students was Rs. 50,000 per month.  The program 'P2' has the total cost over 4 years as Rs 20 lakhs and the median salary offered last year to graduating students was Rs. 60,000 per month. Which one would you choose.

The typical answer I have received is that P1 has the payback period of 20 months, and P2 has a payback period of 33 months (just divide the total cost by first month salary), and hence P1 is obviously far better.

Let us do some maths now. But before that, let us make some assumptions. One will work for 50 years. OK, let us say 40 years. That the average growth rate in salary per year will inflation plus 5% (an extremely conservative estimate). Now, let us look at what does an additional investment of Rs. 10 lakhs give us:

First year, an additional Rs 1.2 lakhs and every year, this number increases by 5% at constant prices. So in 40 years, you will earn an extra 1.45 crores. Remember this is at constant prices and over and above inflation. There is no investment in the world that can beat this or come even close. And this is when we had taken an extremely conservative numbers. Just to compare, an investment at 10% (remember, we are discounting inflation in all our calculations), will give you 1 lakh per year for 40 years, that is 40 lakhs in 40 years. (I am not assuming reinvestment, but consumption, but it would not make any difference to the point.)

Now, if we assume that P1 is likely to be poorer quality and P2 is likely to be higher quality and that is why P2 is able to command a higher price, there will be an additional effect. People with P1 may grow at 5% (plus inflation) but people with P2 degree may grow at 7% (plus inflation). Better quality education also has other side effects in terms of taking better decisions in life.

The summary is that if a higher cost program results in even a small increase in placement, it is a better RoI for you. (Again, a statutory warning to nor consider RoI but quality of faculty, personal interests, curriculum, while taking the decision regarding higher education.)

 

 

Difference between Top educational institutions and the next

There is one question that has bothered me for long. The academic preparation or the quality in general of students entering IITs (and other top institutions) and Tier 2 institutions is only marginally different. But the quality of graduates from Tier 1 and Tier 2 is vastly different. From Tier 2 institutions, the best students do extremely well, even better than an average Tier 1 graduate, but if we compare the average Tier 1 and Tier 2 graduates, there is a significant gap.

(Is this gap only my biased perception? I do see a lot more IITians in the top rung of most tech companies. Is this bias and not truth. If truth, is this because of Old Boys networks of IITs. If there is no such gap, are all students and parents wrong in choosing Tier 1 institutions over Tier 2 institutions. One can have all these questions. But for the purpose of this blog, I will assume that there is a significant gap.)

Why a minor gap at admission time expands to a significant gap at the graduation time.

The obvious answer will be that the quality of inputs at Tier 1 institutions are far better than the quality of inputs at Tier 2 institutions. The faculty quality is better. The labs and infrastructure are better. They have access to more people who can help them in better curriculum and all that. Greater amount of resources can lead to better outcomes.

But I am not satisfied with this obvious answer. There must be other factors which are not based on resources alone. Are there cultural factors, for example. And the reason I am trying to find non-resource factors is that if indeed there are such factors, we can bring them to Tier 2 institutions and improve their outcomes without additional resources.

I believe I now understand some of those factors and sharing them in this blog.

Student motivation and aspirations: I think the biggest factor is that when a student joins a Tier 2 institution, the whole world tells him that he has failed in securing admission to Tier 1. This demotivates the student and his aspirations become lower. He stops working as hard as he used to do in school. Only a few remain motivated and hard working. And these students do extremely well throughout their careers.

Mentorship and Networking: In a Tier 1 institution, there are so many visitors, seminars, workshops, lectures. Industry leaders, successful alumni, top academicians, all are visiting the campus frequently. If a student attends even a very small percentage of these events, or interacts with very few of these visitors, that has significant positive impact. One usually finds seniors, recent graduates if not successful old alumni, who can mentor and advice. In Tier 2 institutions, one has lesser number of events due of resource crunch, but more importantly, when they do invite people, they are shy of inviting the top notch people. When a top person does visit a Tier 2 institution, the institution is too bothered about his/her comfort, keep a lot of time in the itinerary for "rest" and also not spend a lot of time interacting with students because the institution does not have confidence in how the students will behave. So the students don't get proper mentorship and advice during their academic program.

Culture: Excellence is a matter of culture. To give a simple example, if there is no attendance requirement, what percentage of students will attend a class in Tier 1 institution, and what percentage of students will attend a class in Tier 2 institution. How many students will try to get an internship on their own six months before the start date. How much is the role of students in taking decisions, giving them a stake in marching towards excellence.

Having recognized some of these non-resource factors, we have tried to make a difference in JK Lakshmipat University.

When students join us in the first year, we repeatedly tell them that not being in top 0.1% of the country on a given day does not define them. In any case, the country is not going to be built by 0.1% people. Many of the students when they realize that what they were considering a failure was only inability to be in the top few on a given day, they do gain some confidence and motivation. There are many sessions in our induction program from experts which makes them believe in themselves.

We have initiated a formal mentorship program in the campus. Every student gets a faculty mentor who meets them regularly and there is also a possibility of getting an external mentor to those who seek one, typically aligning with the career goals of a student. For example, those who are thinking of entrepreneurship, can get a mentor who has done a startup.

We have lots of visitors on campus from both industry and academia and we leverage these visits quite a bit. The visitors are not here to rest in the guest house. There will be people who will interact with them during their travel from airport/station to campus and back and once on campus, there is going to be a series of interactions.

We have a strong Student Mobility Program under which lots of our students spend a semester in IITs and other top institutions to get exposure to the kind of culture we want to develop here.

In our experience, these non-academic interventions really help in improving learning by our students and almost all of these don't require major financial resources to implement.

Software Industry Trainee Layoffs

 A few weeks ago, there were about 400 trainees in Infosys who were separated from the company. This led to two narratives.

Infosys narrative was essentially this: We recruit a large number of graduates without them being ready for the job because the Indian academia is poor quality (obviously, not their words). We look for students who are eager to learn. We make them go through a very high quality training. We invest a lot in them including paying them salary during the training period. Most of these trainees convert into our regular employees. But some have difficulty. We hand hold them, allow them three chances to prove the minimal learning. But every year, a few are not able to learn sufficiently well, and we have to let them go. This is the process we have consistently followed for the last 20 years, and the same process was followed this year too.

The narrative of the trainees was this: This wasn't a simple case of a few trainees not able to learn what they were taught. This was mass layoffs. About 400 trainees were laid off. The company suddenly increased the syllabus, reduced the training time, made the question paper tougher, and increased the pass percentage substantially. All this was designed to deliberately show this as trainees' inability to learn but it is essentially layoffs.

There is also an additional issue of how the activity was conducted with bouncers, and not allowing them to stay on even for just overnight, and all that. If true, I think Infosys could have been a bit more sensitive around the process but frankly, the main issue is separation from the company. So let us focus on that.

The trainees were asked to learn what they should have learnt in their four years. Every Computer Science program in the country would have a curriculum that has a significant overlap with what Infosys wanted trainees to learn. If they knew what they were supposed to have learnt in the college, the training and the testing would be a breeze. But it was difficult only because they didn't learn sufficiently well in the 4 years of college. No one has claimed so far that the syllabus of training was not related to a computer science degree program.

Students not learning much in 4 years of the college is not just a problem, it is an epidemic. But if you are enjoying your college life to the extent of ignoring academics completely, you are taking a risk. The risk is that you may not get a job at all. And if you get a job, you may not be able to learn new things quickly and get fired. And if you took this risk as an adult, you have to now face the consequences. You can't now point to others who also took the same risk, and were luckier, and demand that you be treated same as them. Remember, there were lakhs of students who took the same risk, and were even less lucky than you were, and they didn't even get a job.

Many trainees claimed that they were given a joining date 2.5 years after the job offer. This is certainly not helping your cause. Did you not apply for other jobs? If so, you weren't good enough for any other job. If not, did you use this time to improve your learning, or did you continue to enjoy this as an extension of college life.

Unfortunately, what happened in Infosys will keep repeating in near future.Thanks to AI, number of jobs in the low level IT services will go down and companies in this segment will reduce their hiring and increase their firing. So if you don't learn fast enough, you will be in trouble sooner or later.

If you are still in college, the lesson in this episode is that you must learn your basics well in your college years. Otherwise, AI will eat your job and you will be left to criticize the software industry.

 

Are Competetive Exams (like NEET, JEE) Fair?

There is a big debate about the fairness of NEET given all the allegations of paper leak, favoritism by some center superintendents, grace marks for loss of time, two correct answers for one question, and so on. They are all implementation issues which I am sure will keep improving year to year.

I think the bigger question is whether such exams like NEET and JEE are fair even if the implementation is perfect and there are no charges of wrongdoing. Almost everyone in this country (except a few in Tamilnadu) seems to believe that if the same question paper is given to two students (may be in their respective languages) then it is a fair exam. And the believers include most academicians as well.

What is fairness. What type of student should, in general, be ranked higher? Do we have an answer to this question? No. In the past, I have asked IITs whether they have a definition of what kind of student they want to select and why, and whether they have at any point in time checked if JEE (and now JEE Advanced) is selecting those kinds of students. If you don't even know what kind of students you are trying to select, how can you declare fairness.

Let us assume a definition of fairness. An exam will be fair if a student who has learnt what has been taught to him/her very well because this gives a university hope that the student will learn well in the programs to which s/he will be admitted.

Now think about it. A student from board of state 1, and another student from board of state 2 are given the same exam which is based on the syllabus of the board of state 1. Is this a fair exam.

This will be a problem with any exam under the concept of "One Nation, One Test." The syllabus of the exam cannot be the intersection of all state boards since that would be too small a set. And if you are going to test it on any other syllabus, its overlap with different state boards will be to a different extent causing unfairness.

Such a test is not just unfair to students, but it is also unfair to universities. Every program is slightly different and this may need different inputs. A university may have a program which requires a greater focus on communication and hence they may want to admit students with decent language skills. Should they not have the right to do so. Admission is basically a system of predicting who will succeed in the program or benefit most from the program. Can we say that the same test will predict success of all programs in the country.

Unfortunately, in a country with very few good colleges, the competition for those few colleges is so intense and the incentive to game/hack the system is so high, that fairness takes the back seat. Any agency conducting the exams will only care that the exam can result in a ranking of students and the process passes the judicial test of fairness. Who cares if it does not pass the academic test of fairness.

Given the reality of few good seats being chased by large number of students, is there no hope of at least improving fairness. There is. One can go back to having multiple exams, may be one based on each state board syllabus. May be there is an exam conducted by a private party which will include language and other skills. A student can try taking those exams which are closest to examining his/her strengths. And a university can choose the exam that it wants to use for admissions. It can even have some seats through one exam and other seats through other exam and so on.

There are two perceived problems in this. One is that students will have to take a large number of exams, and two, the earlier system prior to NEET was roughly this and it had a lot of corruption including capitation fee.

My answer to this will be that students will need to take 2-3 exams only, may be 4, which is not a problem. In fact, it is good that they will have something to fall back upon if they don't do well in one exam. Second, the corruption happened because the admissions took place at the college who could manipulate the merit list based on capitation fee. We can easily have a centralized counseling for admission. Each university can tell their criteria of ranking applicants and a centralized application server will get applications from students for all colleges they are interested in, and the seats will be allocated centrally. In fact, universities may be allowed any parameter which is objective in nature (to stop manipulation). They may even use grace marks for under-privileged students as long as the criteria for deciding under-privilege status is objective.

So the real solution to NEET is to have several smaller exams. That will be more fair to both students and universities.

Problems with NEET 2024

We have serious allegations about the NEET exam this year.

Police has arrested people who have shared an exam paper one night before with some students who paid hefty sums for a look at the questions and answers and they are agreeing that the questions that they crammed the night before indeed appeared in the exam next day. (Media Report here)

We have seen police action on a center where some students were asked to leave the difficult questions which will be marked by the person before packing up the OMR sheets. Several students from around the country somehow knew about this and gave the option of this center. But, of course, when several students knew about this, it also means that someone will leak the information to Police and that is what seems to have happened. (Media Report here.)

The next problem is that of "wasted time." This happened because in many centers, there was an error in distribution the correct question paper (language) and by the time, the correct paper could be distributed, significant amount of time was wasted. And NTA decided to compensate for the loss of time by giving grace marks (which they later withdrew). This is probably the most ridiculous thing that has happened and points to incompetence of NTA. I have been involved with IIT JEE in the pre JEE Advanced days, when several lakh students took the exam with OMR sheets. We almost never had a situation where wrong question paper is being distributed, and if by chance, such an error indeed happened, the center representative was authorized to compensate for that time by extending the closing time. If the exam started 10 minutes late, it will end 10 minutes late. It is as simple as that. Did NTA not have such a simple SOP? Also, when this issue of wasted time came into limelight, and a decision was taken to compensate for the time, they did it only for those students who went to court. If a student did not go to court but only complained to the center, no compensation. What happens to poor students. Is it obvious to everyone that they should go to court for every small thing which can be handled at a center level.

I wonder why they can't use the same model as JEE Mains for NEET. There are lots of sessions, which means that there are lots of question papers. So any one paper getting leaked, the person accessing it would not know whom to sell and hence the incentive for leaking the paper is minimized. Also, it is online and hence there are no physical copies to leak. Further, if there is any problem with the machine, the exact time and every keystroke is recorded, and hence it would be easy to figure out what was the loss for each individual student. And, there are two groups of sessions and every student can take the exam twice. This way, if some thing indeed happened with a few individuals, they have another attempt. Not every minor incident would need to be handled by re-examination.

Of course, this is not to say that JEE Mains is above all suspicions. People are very creative and there is technology to hack every system. But, by and large, JEE Mains is a better managed exam than NEET and we can learn from it. And both are conducted by NTA only.

Having said all this, I think the biggest problem with NEET is not the poor conduct of the exam, but the notion of "One Nation, One Test." This notion puts all the eggs in one basket, makes it super important for people to do well in that one exam. When the competition is that high, some people will use their creativity to hack into the system and sell their service to students and parents and there will always be some students/parents who will agree to get ahead through these means. And of course, "One Nation, One Test" may sound fair, but it is not fair, and I will write another blog around it soon.

I don't know what solution will NTA or Supreme Court will come up with. But I have one request. All those who have received 720 marks out of 720 (some of them removed from the list after grace marks were removed), they should all have the right to which ever college they want to study in. I know NEET had pre-announced the tie breaking rules. I am OK with those tie breaking rules for everyone but not for those who have got 720 marks. For everyone else, one can say that you should have worked harder, gotten another question right, but you can't say this to someone who has got all questions right. What more should s/he have done to get admission to their top choice.

An 18 year old who have worked really hard and got 100% marks is now being told, "Sorry, you can't get into AIIMS, Delhi, because of things that are not in your control." This is unacceptable. If there aren't as many seats in a college as are the number of 100% students are interested in, then for this particular year, we should allow super-numerary seats.

Return-on-Investment in Education

During this time of the year, when millions of students are deciding which college to go to and what program to enroll in, one question that is often asked is, "What is the RoI of the program?" RoI means "Return on Investment.

Now, RoI of education is a bit complicated, because it is not just the additional money that you can potentially earn, but also the quality of job, and the quality of life, happiness, and the privileges of connections and so on. But let us assume that everything can be reduced to a number, the financial returns.

What is the financial return of a program. Well, one has to see what would be the estimate of lifelong earnings of the person without doing that program, and compare that with the estimated earnings of the person after doing the program. The difference between the two can be attributed as return due to that program. Now, you can sense that this is not easy. One can perhaps model an average person but it does not work for an individual because your return on investment could be very different from my return on investment simply because you are more prone to doing a corporate job after the same degree while I am interested in becoming a teacher. The financial returns over the next 50 years in an uncertain world under two hypothetical conditions, impossible.

But still we need to decide whether to spend a very significant amount of money or not. Is there a proxy for RoI calculation. Yes, of course. Without this, what will all the consultants do. It is a simple proxy. You take your expense over the program, and look at the first month salary of an average student in the last batch graduated and computed in how many months one would get as much salary as the amount spent in the program. So, if the fees for a BTech program is 15 lakhs over 4 years and the average package in the university for that program is Rs 50,000 per month, then the RoI is 30 months (never mind that RoI in financial world is in terms of percentage, here months will do). One can question the exactness - you haven't taken into account the hostel/mess expense, you haven't taken the cost of time, you haven't taken into account the interest, and all that, but well, it was always supposed to be a proxy, an estimate.

But this has several problems. (And I am not even talking about how do you know these numbers. Everyone seems to present these numbers in the most confusing way.)

First, should you consider the highest salary in RoI computation or the average salary or the median salary. What is your expectation from the program - do you expect to be closer to the highest or average or what. One would say that what is the expectation of an average student. That should determine RoI of the program. But the expectation of an average student is the median placement offer and not the average placement offer. And I have never seen anyone talk about median. Everyone talks about average which could be significantly higher than median. Next, should you only consider jobs in the core engineering or all jobs of students graduating with that degree. If you look at all students, then you will get biased result. The RoI will be biased by the societal bias (good students getting to a program causing higher placement and not something that you learn in the program causing higher placement). On the other hand, if you look at only core jobs that is not right for the undergraduate programs because it is expected that you are learning to be ready for a non-core job.

OK. So we will toss a coin and take a decision of what jobs to consider for RoI. But then this method has other serious concern. If you have a choice between a 4-year BTech and a 5-year BTech-MTech dual degree (or integrated MTech), what would you choose. Your cost has gone up by at least 25% (if you don't include interest and the fees is not going up by inflation) and unless the median/average salary offer is also higher by 25% or more, it does not make sense to do MTech. In certain industries, and certain kinds of jobs, MTech is still considered very valuable and over 50 years of career, you will be compensated for that one year extra education.

Similarly, there are disciplines which have a slower start but you get to the same point in due course. So if you are taking a decision based only on first month salary, you will not choose disciplines with slower start. The reason why some of the engineering disciplines are less popular today is that first people tend to over-estimate earnings based on highest salaries offered in certain popular disciplines, and second, the core engineering have a slower start of the career.

There are other slow-start careers like Design (this is changing though). In disciplines like Design where one works with other designers in small firms, the importance of working with better known designers is so much that you may have to work for a much smaller salary initially till you establish yourself. And, therefore, the number of students interested in design are less and as the opportunities for earning better salaries right in the beginning are improving, the number of students getting interested in design are increasing.

The obvious question then is this. If estimating lifelong earnings is impossible, and just considering the estimated first month salary is deeply flawed, how do we choose between the two programs.

My answer is this. If you are taking education loan, and you don't have family support to pay that loan, then you really have no option but to look at the first month expected salary. (But even in this situation, you should only decide whether you will be able to pay the EMI, and not compare programs on where you will have more savings or less savings after paying EMI.)

In general, if you are being funded through parental savings, then think like this. What are people doing 5-10 years after doing that program. If it is a new program, can you guess based on a "similar" program. If it is a new college, can you guess based on similar program in other colleges where you think the quality of education is likely to be similar. And if that profile is to your liking, both in terms of job content and reasonable financial gains, it is ok to do that course. And if you have a choice between several such courses, choose the discipline you are interested in, or choose the college where you think the quality of education (broadly defined) will be better.

This advice is based on my life principle that while it is important to have financial security and enjoy the good things of life, beyond a certain level of prosperity, one should look for happiness, impact, time for family, and such, and money should become secondary. And if money is primary for you, go back to previous paragraph and see which program leads to best jobs after 5-10 years and one way to check that is to check linkedin profiles of alumni. So check out 5-10 years and not one month.

JEE Mains 2024 Result: Why Advanced Cutoff Highest in 5 years

The result of JEE Mains 2024 is out and every newspaper is reporting that the cutoff for eligibility of general category for JEE Advanced (for admission to IITs) has gone up to 93.2 percentile. In 2023, this cutoff was 90.7 an in 2022, this cutoff was 88.4.

Why has this happened. The simple answer is that the competition has increased. The number of students taking the JEE Mains exam has increased substantially this year and hence the percentile score has gone up.

To explain this with an example. If I want to select 10 students out of 100, I am selecting those who are above 90 percent of the students, or in other words, my cutoff is 90 percentile. But if I want to select 10 students out of 150, I am selecting those who are above 93.33 percent students, or in other words, my cutoff is 93.33.

If we look at the numbers, the total number of students who took JEE Mains (in either session) in 2023 was 11.13 lakhs, while the total number of students who took JEE Mains in 2024 was 14.15 lakhs, an increase of 3 lakh students. So clearly, if the same number of students is being selected for JEE Advanced (roughly 2.5 lakhs), the cutoff will go up. Please note that it is not dependent on the difficulty level of the question papers in different sessions. So one cannot interpret this data to imply that questions were easier or tougher this year.

But if this simple answer was the complete reason for increase in cutoff, I wouldn't be writing this blog. Enough media houses have pointed out the increased number of candidates. In fact, if the reason was only the increased number of students, the cutoff should have been around 92.7 percentile (and not 93.2).

There is another very interesting reason for increase in cutoff. And that is the impact of two sessions of JEE Mains exam.

A student can take JEE Mains once or twice (in January/April). The higher of the two scores is assigned to the student. Now, consider a scenario where 100 students take the exam in the first session, and the same 100 students take the exam in the second session. The top 10 of the first session is the same set as top 10 of the second session. And now, if I am selecting the top 10 students, I will select those who are above 90 percent students in either of the two sessions, or 90 percentile will be my cutoff. But if the two set of 10 toppers are completely disjoint, that is, there is no common person in top 10 (actually top 5), then I end up taking top 5 of first session, and top 5 of the second session, and my cutoff will be 95 percentile. So the interesting consequence of two session exam is that more than 1 percent students can be there within 1 percentile.

So, the cutoff crucially depends on not just the total number of students, but also on how many students took the exam twice and how many of them had inconsistent results in two attempts. Inconsistency here means that their performances in two sessions is significantly different. And that seems to have played a role in increasing this year's cutoff.

Last year, 5.94 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 11.13 lakh unique students, which means that 53 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. This year, 8.23 lakh students appeared in both sessions out of 14.15 lakh unique students, which means that 58 percent of all unique exam takers appeared in both sessions. So a lot more people have worked hard in the intervening period to see a significant increase in their performance compared to session 1, and that has increased the cutoff by another 0.5 percentile.

Please note that the exact cutoff would also be dependent on the distribution of the number of candidates of different categories, how many students from different categories get counted in general category because of their top performance, and so on. But there is no reason to think that across just one year, there would be significant differences in group performances.

What to do if you didn't meet the cutoff for JEE Advanced but still want to study in an IIT.

Most IITs have a scheme to allow students from other colleges to study as a non-degree student for a semester or two. But pretty much no college has a system of credit transfer despite NEP2020. To the best of my knowledge, the only university in India which sends a large fraction of their students to do coursework in IITs is JK Lakshipat University in Jaipur.

There is also a very liberal scholarship for those who have done well in JEE Mains. If you have 95+ percentile in JEE Mains, you study for free. If you have 90-95 percentile in JEE Mains, you get 75% fee waiver, and so on. And these scholarships can potentially last for all four years based on performance. Check out the details on the scholarship page.

 

Is there a problem if everyone wants to study CS/AI

In every media interaction and now, even social gatherings, I get asked if Indian growth story will get affected if no one studies Civil/Chemical/Mechanical/Electrical and everyone only wants to do CS, AI, and at best ECE. How will the new infrastructure be built. How will we become a hub for manufacturing. Can we be VishwaGuru with everyone studying only AI.

And I tell them to just relax. Lots of students are studying non-CS/IT engineering branches. One can check AICTE data for the same. There is no shortage of pieces of paper declaring someone to be a graduate in Civil Engineering. And it takes only 4 years to print more paper, if there is need.

The problem is that degrees are only on paper and do not reflect learning. Industry is genuinely worried that they are not finding good engineers. But that problem is also true for software industry. They too are not finding good engineers.

Who are joining non-IT engineering programs. There are, of course, rare students who for whatever reasons are interested in these programs. But these are rare. In any given college students prefer CS and related programs over other engineering programs. This is true of IITs and this is true of Tier 3 colleges. But a lot of students think about non-CS in a more competitive college versus CS in less competitive college and there are enough who choose non-CS in a more competitive college. This comparison happens not just between IIT Civil versus NIT CS. It also happens between Civil Engineering at an affiliated college versus CS at a private university. (Affiliated colleges are cheaper and a lot of students/parents believe that getting a degree from a government owned technical university is somehow more valuable and education does not matter.) This comparison is here to stay and we will always find enough students taking up non-IT engineering programs.

There are some smart students who take benefit from this lopsided preference of the society. They can get admission to a college which provides much better overall education than they would have got if all branches had equal interest from students, and they get better placement too. Don't believe me, let me explain.

Most people would look at placement data and see that average of CS batch is higher than average of Civil batch. They also notice that the highest salaries in CS are much higher than the highest salaries in Civil. And they assume that they are the ones who will get those highest salaries. But smart people will think differently. They will understand that it is very difficult to be the topper of CS batch while it is much easier in a less competitive branch. It is aided by the fact that a lot of students who join non-IT branches keep wondering if they took the right decision and whether they should have taken up CS in a less competitive college. Their peers also demotivate them. The smart people will further notice that the top few jobs to Civil engineering graduates are of higher amount than the median of CS. And hence the expected placement is better in Civil for these people. (Of course, I must quickly add that I would never recommend anyone to choose a branch based on placement data or a faulty concept like Return-on-investment. But man people still do that.)

So, overall, I don't see a problem in terms of number of people opting for non-IT branches. The problem is that a very large number of people are not getting the education they deserve in every discipline.

The related question is if it is possible for a top institution to attract better (read, more motivated) students to non-IT programs. Yes, it is possible. The simple method is to project placement data differently (unfortunately, people will look at placement data). Instead of projecting data in terms of discipline, if they project data in terms of CGPA, and point out that the placement is strongly correlated with CGPA (and to a lesser extent with a discipline), the craze for certain disciplines will go down. Also, if they don't already offer minor in CS/AI, do so. The students will have the confidence that if they don't get a job in their chosen discipline, they can go back to IT recruiters in the final year. And, finally, offer dual major. A student admitted to Civil should have the option to pick up his/her second major in CS/AI. This, again, gives confidence to the student in case things don't go right in Civil, and also produces inter-disciplinary engineers which are so important for the industry.

Progression of an engineering student in a typical college

Yesterday, one Mr. Angad Daryani, CEO of a startup, Praan Inc, tweeted about an IIT Kanpur graduate whose CV, should we say, had a few things which he hadn't done. He has since deleted the tweet (or post on X, but old timers like me still call it twitter) saying that the tweet resulted in IIT bashing which wasn't the intention. The intention was to point out lack of ethics in some people only.

I replied to that that this lack of ethics is very common in Indian academia and not limited to IITs. This also had a lot of reactions and I started thinking about why does this happen.

The life of a typical student interested in engineering changes as s/he enters class 11th (sometimes even in class 9th, and in rare cases, even earlier). They have to go through JEE coaching, a lot of hard work, typically, more than 12 hours a day, every day, for two years. No one can do this kind of hard work unless the fruits are really sweet. So they are told by everyone in the society, including parents, teachers, neighbors, and relatives, "You only have to do hard work these two years, and your life will be made."

The clear implication is that college life is cool. At least that is how most students understand this. And students fall for this. A majority of them work extremely hard with the goal of getting into a top college.

Two years later, most of them will get a shock. Only one percent of our 17-18 year olds will get into top colleges. Others will have to think of second and third options. But whatever it is, whether IITs or a local engineering college, the expectation is the same that College Life is Cool. After all, all the elders cannot be wrong.

Students who go to top colleges realize very soon that they have been lied to. Most of them will adjust to new reality, some won't and will pay a price in future. But students who go to next tier colleges have a slightly different journey.

Students join a college thinking they don't have to study. But the other thing that has happened is that they had a goal for the last 2 (or 4) years and they were working much harder than what they would have done earlier. Now, whether they achieved that goal or not is not so meaningful, but it is extremely difficult to live a goalless life after working so hard for a goal for 2 years. (In that sense, entrance exams do affect the mental health of a large number of students who do not get admission to top colleges.) In our times, we could explore the college for a couple of semesters before thinking what we want to do with our lives. But not today. They need to have another goal quickly. How do they decide the next goal.

The other change that is happening at that time is adjustment to the college life. Experts have pointed out that the transition from school to college is a very stressful period for most students across the world.

So, we have three things happening. One, the expectation that the college life will be cool. Two, the stress of a transition period. Three, anxiety to set up the next goal. Whom does the first year student go to for clarity? No, not the faculty members who have seen such students in thousands, not the professional counselors of the university, not the career services office. They go to 2nd year students since they were in the same position most recently and therefore are most likely to understand their situation.

But, the second year students have no experience. They don't know what opportunities the world will have. They don't know what is needed for grabbing those opportunities. They haven't sat for a single interview for an internship. But do they say, they don't know. Of course, not. No one ever admits to not knowing something. So a confident answer is given. Your next goal should be a job. And you need two things for the job: Good grades and good soft skills.

So far, so good. No major problem with the advice. Yes, I would tell the students to do more thinking, talk to more people over the next one year, don't drop the alternatives like higher education, entrepreneurship, etc. But still, quite ok till now.

The next advice is where everything goes wrong. They are told that good grades are easy. You can just copy everything. There is no need to learn. You can prepare for campus interviews in a month in the third year. Till then, enjoy campus life. Of course, soft skills are harder to imbibe, and hence the freshers are advised to join multiple clubs, and do a whole lot of extra-curriculars.

Notice that this advice is completely consistent with what they had heard from their parents, their teachers, and everyone else. And they follow it diligently. In JKLU, where we have strong rules against copying and we have failed student for first time copying, dropped a semester for second time copying and terminated a student for third time copying, the parents will not just seek pardon for their wards, some of them will argue how we can be so different from other colleges.

In most colleges, faculty will not check for copying and really don't care for student success. So not copying can mean that those cheating can get better grades. That demoralizes a few who are still thinking of doing projects ethically. They don't realize that their career will depend more on learning and not so much on grades. At that age, grades seem like the only goal to care for. (And the society has contributed to that obsession.)

It is only in third year that they start applying for a serious internship and this is when they get a shock of their life. They fail interview after interview. Some students are smart. They realize the mistake they made in the first two years. Now, start learning and get ahead. But a lot of students are stuck. And they will either get no jobs or at best get the 3.5 to 4 lakh job in software services where the company is only looking for students who can learn (and not for students who already know something), and then have a 3-4 months training for them.

How do we solve this problem. We do a few things. First, in all our communication during the induction program, it is repeated several times that we want students to do assignments themselves, that we provide additional support in terms of student TAs, faculty office hours, and strongly encourage all first year students to take advantage of such additional resources. We also provide them a curated list of free online resources for each course, including Coursera (which we provide free to all of them). We also tell them that copying can lead to serious consequences and give examples from the past. We also try to create situations where the first year students have occasions to meet the 3rd year and 4th year students. They can certainly get better advice from senior students compared to 2nd year students.

 

Note: This journey is based on my travel to more than 100 engineering colleges and talking to several thousand students. I have not been traveling so much for the last 5-6 years. I am assuming that contours of the problem haven't changed much.

Are Students our Customers

Over the last two to three decades, the language in higher education has changed. When I was looking for higher education as a student, the talk was about quality of education and the affordability of education. But the language today is branding, return on investment, etc. I keep hearing that students are our customers and we must keep our customers happy. And in this situation, the customer delight is all about placement or more bluntly, return-on-investment (that too in short term).

I am too old fashioned to appreciate this.

To me the relationship between the student/alumni and an educational institution is not transactional. It is not that one pays some money and one gets some education in return. There is a relationship that is life long and the relationship is one with no expectations or in some sense, huge expectations. When I was looking at my flight options from Delhi to Cancun, Mexico, I could change flights in multiple cities in North America or Europe, but I chose to spend several hours in Washington DC, since my alma mater, University of Maryland, College Park is nearby and I would like to meet some alums and faculty members there before hopping on to the next flight. I can't imagine visiting Kanpur without dropping by in IIT Kanpur campus. A transactional relationship does not last this long.

People whom I have taught decades ago still keep in touch, still ask for advice and I still reply. In which business, the organization will spend time to help someone who was a customer 25 years ago. We do this because we are not a business.

And how do you compute return-on-investment anyway. And how much return is good enough?

Quality education has many consequences, a higher salary is just one of them. You pick up certain skills which may not immediately provide you returns in terms of first salary but will help you in life. It enables you to take better decisions in all spheres of life including dealing with family and friends. You become part of an alumni network which often provides certain level of support in various situations. What monetary numbers are you going to put for these benefits to evaluate your RoI?

A student who considers himself as customer will invariably demand better facilities (which is ok) but a student who considers herself as a learner is more likely to demand better education.

But, of course, it is not just students and parents who think of themselves as customers, even some universities consider students as customers. They also realize that the RoI computation by these customers is strictly based on first month salary after the program. These universities will in their curriculum put focus on those skills which are immediately in demand, and they don't care if the knowledge of these graduates will become obsolete very soon. On the other hand, good universities will want to ensure lifelong success of their students which means a very different approach to education. Learning how to learn becomes important. Skills like Critical thinking become important. More focus on basic concepts is needed.

Whenever I say things like these, the question that I often get asked is this. "I want to be a learner and not a customer. But how do I evaluate that there is better learning in a university. If metrics like higher return-on-investment are not indicative of better learning, then what is." Well, I have answered it in many blogs in the past. The bottomline is "faculty." And the best way to find out is by looking at their profile, and by visiting the campus and talking to some of them and their students.

To close, I will repeat what I have said in the beginning. I don't consider myself as a past customer of IIT Kanpur or University of Maryland. I have a lifelong relationship with my alma maters and not a transactional one.

Sports Quota in IIT Madras

Recently, IIT Madras announced admission to its flagship BTech programs for those who excel in sports. They call it Sports Excellence Admission. The student should have got at least one medal at an international or national event in a specified list of sports. The ranking would depend on the number of medals, whether gold/silver/bronze, the type of competition, etc. The student should also have done well in JEE Mains and be selected to take JEE Advanced. He should have further done well in JEE Advanced to receive a rank in whatever category the student belongs to (whether general or SC/ST/PD/OBC and so on). The student should also have passed eligibility in 12th class. IIT Madras is creating two seats in each of its BTech programs for sports excellence.

It is the first time any IIT is considering admission based on excellence in sports. For a long time, the admission was strictly based on JEE. In the 1960s, there were admissions for board toppers. And then in 1960s and 1970s, there were lateral admission in 2nd year to a few students (at least in IIT Kanpur, but only one of those actually joined, and left IITK after a semester, so no one from lateral admission ever received a degree).

I have written many articles over the years asking IITs to consider an alternate admission mechanism based on performance in Olympiads (Science and Informatics), and there is thankfully some progress in that over the last few years. I know at least IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar have admission processes based on Olympiads performance.

Having alternate admission mechanisms bring in diversity in the classroom which enhances the quality of education for everyone (and not just for those who came in through alternate mechanism). Also, if this move catches on and other IITs also offer similar admissions (and hopefully lower the academic bar), there will be many school students who will feel less stressed and can follow their passion.

The key issue here is what should be the academic bar for these admissions. The problem is that if you do not have any academic requirement, then obviously the sports quota student may have serious difficulty in carrying out academic work at an IIT. On the other hand, having a very high bar will mean that anyone who has spent a lot of time on the field will not be able to come through this mechanism. What is the right balance? Difficult to say.

I wonder if IIT Madras did some research into this and are there students who get medals at national level games and also get a rank in IIT JEE (Advanced), and are there many of them. They are talking about 2 seats per UG program. Hence, about 20 seats. Are there 20 such students. I doubt it. So, are they hoping that this will encourage many sports persons to go for JEE coaching.

In IIIT Delhi, we had similarly desired to attract sports persons to the institute, and we took a slightly different approach. We said that if someone worked hard to play for India (in recognized sports events), they worked less on their JEE (Mains) preparation and we will assume (based on some research) that if they had not spent that time on sports, they would have got a 2 percentile increase in their JEE score (which is a rank improvement by 20,000). Similarly, if they played at the national level (represented their state), we will add 1 percentile to their JEE score. Similarly, for Chess, we said that we will work with FIDE rating. Above a certain rating, we will add 2 percentile to your JEE score, and above a lower cutoff, we will add 1 percentile to your JEE score.

The beauty of this scheme was that we didn't need any super-numerary seats. We didn't need to worry about reservations in these seats (since there is no seat outside the reservation system), we didn't need to find a complicated way to rank sports persons from different sports. We didn't need to decide how many seats in each program. We just bumped up their JEE score and put them back in the counseling process. Simple.

It worked for us as we got a couple of students through this mechanism every year. But, we were working with JEE Mains which I believe is better aligned with school board syllabus than JEE (Advanced), and hence the requirement of performance in JEE Advanced is much harder for a sports person to meet. So even with JEE Mains, getting 20 sports persons to get decent ranks would be a challenge. But with JEE Advanced, this seems like an impossible ask.

So, on the face of it, the announcement appears to be just to collect brownie points with no real intention to admit sports persons. But I hope I am proven wrong and there will be at least 4-5 student joining IITM this year, if not 20.

Multi-disciplinary Education: Why is it important?

NEP 2020 talks about universities becoming multi-disciplinary and offering programs which have courses from multiple disciplines. What is multi-disciplinary education?

It is simple. When you study to get a degree in a particular discipline, you don't just study courses in that discipline, but from various other disciplines as well. For example, if you want to do a major in Computer Science, you will study a significant number of courses in Computer Science, but you will also do courses from Mathematics, Engineering, Humanities, and so on.

This all sounds familiar. The important question is: Aren't all university programs multi-disciplinary in nature already. Why is NEP or educationists in general even talking about it. If everyone has accepted it, what is the point of this blog.

Well, everyone hasn't accepted it, and a lot of universities are simply paying lip service to it. And it is a matter of degree. If there is a program in which you have to do 40 courses in 4 years, should you have 10 courses from outside the major discipline, or 20 or 25. So details are important.

Frankly, students have not accepted it, and many universities haven't understood the reason to do it and therefore implement it in ways that goes counter to the reason why it should be done.

For a long time, good universities had a broad based under-graduate education because the education was supposed to make you a good citizen who should be aware of a lot of different things. It was felt that under-graduate program is to improve the breadth and to enable a large number of different careers. If students can pick up very different careers, they ought to have been trained on several different things. But lately, even in the western world, college education is being seen more as improving employability and preparing for a narrower set of careers. People are talking about education being an investment and looking for a return on investment (RoI).

In this new world, students are demanding to know why every course is being taught and how it is going to be useful in one's career. And by "career", they often don't mean next 30-50 years, but the first job that they expect through campus placement. And a large number of courses that we teach (even within the major discipline) aren't meant to help find the first job.

The reality is that your first job is often based on knowledge and skills that you can pick up through a good school education and perhaps six to twelve months of additional training. So if you are only looking for the first job and only want to study which will quickly get you that first job, you don't need to join college at all. (Of course, there is a signaling value in joining a college.)

If I look at the journey of an engineering student, s/he would have started studying for JEE (or other exams) while in 11th class (if not in 9th class, and sometimes even earlier). They had a goal to get into IITs or some other good institution. When they finally take admission to some college, their earlier goal has become irrelevant (whether they succeeded in it or not). To maintain their sanity and motivation, they need to quickly decide on their next goal and works towards them. And often, the goal they choose is to get a job at the end of 4 years (as distinct from thinking about a long term career, or to have a goal of becoming a good engineer independent of what job they will get). And they start thinking of how they will find that job. They figure that they will need to learn a few things and get some soft skills which will be useful in the interview process. Note that they are only focusing on getting a job and not doing a job well. Very quickly they figure out that pretty much no software company asks them questions on chemistry or physics, or a lathe machine, or sociology and so on. And they start questioning why these subjects are being taught to them.

The faculty members are often able to say that courses like partial differential equation will help solve some problems in future (do software developer even code matrix manipulation? no, they just make function calls). But even faculty members are not able to explain why a CS student needs to study Chemistry.

The fact of the matter is that the broad based education has different goals than a very narrow goal that the students want to pursue. And instead of explaining them how a course will help in their narrow goals, we should be talking about why broader goals are important. And the broader goals are not only to become a good citizen aware of a lot of different things from various different perspectives, but also to prepare for future jobs which are yet unknown, and since we don't know what the future requirements are, it is good to have a broad based education since that would increase the chance of success in that unknown world.

If one wants to be highly successful in one's career, there are often two ways to get there. One, you be amongst the best in your chosen field (top 1-2%). This way, you would have respect, you will rise quickly, you will make an impact. Two, you be very good in more than one field (top 25% in say computer science and music). Since most people focus on one field, people who are very good in two or more fields are in big demand and they rise quickly. And most people find it easier to be very good in two things than excellent in one. You have chosen one major discipline based on your interest or guidance you received. Now, you should think of another discipline to be good at. If your curriculum at the university is multi-disciplinary, you would be exposed to many disciplines, learn them seriously and think about what did you enjoy doing the most. That could be your second discipline to get very good at.

The other reason to study multiple things is that most technical knowledge and skills would be obsolete within a few years. A student entering college today would almost certainly be working 50 years from now. How does one survive if most things that one learnt in the university are obsolete. Well, you need to keep learning always. And how do learn as adults. We learn by connecting any new information with the old information we already have. If you know a wide variety of things, there is a better chance that the new thing you need to learn has some connection with what you already know.

In fact, when you learn a seemingly unrelated topic, you still get ideas from that course which can be useful in your primary discipline. Many problems that you will solve in future will require an understanding of its domain.

People become more creative when they study multiple subjects. Some people may be born creative. But a lot of people who are creative have seen many different perspectives in life and are able to use all that knowledge in coming up with a solution.

I can go on and on, but the point is that learning topics from different disciplines have several advantages if you consider broader life and career goals as opposed to just succeed in a campus placement interview.

Now, where do Tier 2/3 universities go wrong in implementing multi-disciplinary curriculum. Note that all the advantages we talked about are accrued by studying a wide variety of subjects. It is not about any specific subjects. While there may be some topics from outside the major discipline which are very important for that discipline (like some Mathematics for Computer Science), and hence can be made compulsory, for the rest of the courses, any set of courses will do as long as there is sufficient breadth. For a computer science program, we may insist on some maths courses, some science courses, some humanities and social science courses, and so on, to require breadth, but there is no justification for making these non-major courses as compulsory. If you want the student to have breadth, let the student decide what will constitute that breadth. If these courses are being done to help in an uncertain future, often your guess regarding what might help a particular student 20 years from now is going to be as bad as the student's own guess.

But most Tier 2/3 universities do not understand the importance of multi-disciplinary curriculum. They are doing it because NEP2020 says so, and because the AICTE model curriculum suggests so. But they have this feeling that this is waste of time, and since these are not "useful" courses, there is no point in investing in them. So no choice to students. May be we can get temporary faculty (low-cost) to teach these courses.

Multi-disciplinary curriculum is so important that one ought to look at university programs from this perspective before confirming admission. And the way to find out whether the university is only paying lip service or is actually serious about multi-disciplinarity is the following:

1. Check the fraction of credits from outside the major discipline. If the major discipline has more than 50 percent credits, it is not good.
2. Does the university offer second major and minor programs (minor in other disciplines as opposed to specialization within the discipline).
3. Does the university offer non-major courses as compulsory courses only or are these electives.

 Once you have determined whether a university is serious about multi-disciplinarity, give that a significant weight while comparing your higher education options.

Note: I had recently given a webinar on this topic with iDreamCareer.com and the recording of that webinar is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85-InERkRWM

IITians in ISRO and other national missions

Recently, ISRO made us all proud by landing near the south pole of the moon, an achievement that no other nation has been able to do. During the festivities that followed, one thing that came out in media repeatedly was that there were very few IITians involved in this project. Indeed, there are very few IITian employees in ISRO.

When this was repeated, there were two implications. One is, of course, that we have a strong talent pool beyond the so-called top institutions in the country. This is very positive for the nation. But, the second implication is a complaint that IITians do not participate in the nation building through government projects. If you go through the comments on the newspaper reports, there is also a sense that if we can get high quality scientists from Tier 2 institutions (at a much lower cost), should we be spending so much on IITs. Should we force IITians to spend a couple of years after their graduation to work in the government sector.

What do numbers say. Well, everyone quotes a news report from 2014 in which it was stated that 2 percent of ISRO employees were alums of IITs or NITs. This information was received through an RTI application, and hence is largely believed to be true. But is this a good statistics to look at. When we look at ISRO employees, they include helpers, peons, drivers and so on. There will be many technicians, admin staff, security and what not. Even in technical staff, I suspect that there will be many jobs where they would prefer scientists over engineers. I couldn't find any distribution of employees in ISRO, but my gut feeling is that the number of jobs in ISRO where IITians can be reasonably expected to participate may be anywhere from one tenth to one fifth of the total number of jobs. Even if we look at one fifth as the number, it means that 10 percent of engineering jobs are taken by graduates of IITs and NITs. And 10 percent is not bad at all, particularly considering that IITs and NITs have never produced more than 3-4 percent of engineers in India.

Do IITians avoid government jobs since one often hears of very high salaries (even more than a crore) from MNCs. Far from it. You look at IAS, IPS, IFS, Forest Service, Revenue Service, Customs, and so on, you will find a lot of IITians there. You will also find IITians in all kind of services in Indian Railways, Military Engineering Services, Department of Telecom, DST, Public Works Departments (both at state and central level). You would also find a large number of them in government institutions and universities. So it does not seem like IITians are running away from the government sector. In fact, their contribution to nation building is truly admirable.

Still, if it seems that given the high profile nature of ISRO, more IITians should have been interested in the organization, there is one issue. A typical IITian prefer an on-campus recruitment or taking an exam which opens up a large number of good options. So the exams that many of them would be interested in include: Civil Services, Indian Engineering Services and now lately, GATE (since many PSUs have started shortlisting candidates based on GATE score). An organization having its own recruitment process which is not centered around on-campus recruitment will not attract IITians (or students from those campuses where there is easy availability of jobs). And there is no need to be judgmental about it. There is nothing wrong for an organization to have its own centralized recruitment process and there is nothing wrong in a student not interested in a process which they perceive as inconvenient. After all ISRO is attracting fabulous talent through its process. So why worry about someone not applying.

The last question is whether it means that we are over-spending on IITs (and by extension on other top institutions). If a smaller college with limited resources can produce such great scientists then why fund IITs and IISERs to such a large extent. I disagree. While you will find that the best graduates of Tier 2 institutions are equal to the best graduates of top institutions, the average graduate of a top institution is often better prepared academically than an average student of a Tier 2 institution. (Otherwise, the private sector wouldn't differentiate between the two.) The fraction of graduates of IITs and IISERs who are well trained is higher than the fraction of graduates of a Tier 2 institution who are well trained. And hence instead of thinking of IITs as wasteful, we should think of investing much more resources in Tier 2 institutions so that a much greater number of their graduates are in top league.

In summary, let us enjoy our moment of glory and success, let us feel good about there being talent in every nook and corner and not try to put down the top institutions. Everyone is contributing to the nation building.

Suicides in Kota: Students Need Career Counseling

Yet another young life lost. The average is more than one per month. Why is it happening.

The simple logic is that there are too few seats in our IITs (for engineering), or too few seats in good (read, government) medical colleges. The quality of education in the next level institutions is much worse. Parents have high aspirations. They push their wards to go to a far off place without the family support. They realize that the competition is extremely tough for those few seats. The students are afraid that they aren't going to come up to the expectations of their near and dear ones. Under that stress, sometimes an unfortunate extreme step is taken.

How do we handle this. Of course, we must provide counseling to these students (I really think all schools should provide counselors in 11th and 12th class at least). But what else.

In the discussion, it is assumed that the stress is the result of too few seats in IITs and the next level institutions being much worse. While the statement is true, I disagree that this is the reason for the stress. I have myself talked to several coaching guys a few years ago when my son was in 11th class. A lot of students coming to coaching have no hopes of cracking IIT. And the coaching institutions tell them that it is important to do well in JEE Mains since that is a ticket to admissions in next level of institutions, including NITs. And stress happens when they realize that they aren't likely to be in the top 50,000 ranks, thereby even the next level institutions that they were targeting weren't quite within the reach.

Now, you may argue whether the stress is for being within the top 10,000 or within the top 50,000, it is all the same and the solution will be the same. I think the two situations are very different and therefore the solutions are very different.

My basic premise is that the quality of education that a top 10,000 person gets is much better than the quality of education that a 20,000 rank student gets. But the gap between the institution that a 20,000 rank student studies in and a 1,00,000 rank student studies in isn't very high.

If the assumption is that suicides happen because the gap between IITs and the next level is too high, then the solutions proposed would be a major restructuring of the education system. Let us expand IIT education. Let us put in a lot more money in NITs. Let us allow more autonomy to top private institutions and allow them to charge more fees. It could even be to hide the difference between IITs and the next level. Let us not talk about the placements, for example.

But if we were to believe that the suicides happen when the student feels that they can't even get 1 lakh rank in JEE Mains, then the solution is just career counseling which is doable now and we don't need a major restructuring of the education system. I mean, telling the students about other options that they will have if they were to get 1L rank or worse, which will be only marginally worse than what they could have been admitted at 40-50 thousand rank. This requires changing perceptions while the earlier assumption required changing reality.

There are so many institutions which provide a good quality education but aren't well known and one is unlikely to believe in their quality just because one person says so. The right thing to do, in my opinion, is that the student after the JEE Mains result is out, should seek information from various sources about the possible colleges to get admission at that level of performance. Go through their websites, get whatever information they think is important, and select 10 colleges. Take the risk and include 2 such colleges about which you are unsure but someone tells you that they are good but unknown. And now visit all these 10 colleges even if they are in 5 different cities. Remember the cost of coaching in Kota would be much more than this visit of 10 campuses and this is the most important decision of your career.

So, basically, what I am suggesting is that if there is career counseling available to students in coaching (and indeed, in all schools across the country) whereby the student is told of several options at various ranks, told that the gap between the well-known colleges and the next level ones isn't too much, encouraged to do research on colleges and shortlist, and visit to finalize the college, I think we can reduce the stress. We don't have to wait for the country to restructure entire education to save lives.

At least in Engineering and Computer Science, they can be told of online resources that they can use to get quality education even if they get admitted to lesser known colleges. They can be told of programs such as BSc of IIT Madras which they can do along with their other degrees. Overall, a student with 1-2 lakh JEE Mains rank has many good options in life and career counseling will make a difference to his/her stress levels..

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.

How to Pay for Quality Higher Education

 Higher education is accessible in India. Scratch that. Worthless degrees are quite accessible in India. How do we change that and ensure that quality higher education is accessible to most in India.

Let us do the numbers. NEP2020 has set a goal of 50% GER in a little over a decade. As of now, the total number of people in India in the age group of 18 to 23 are over 12 crores. 50% GER would mean that there are 6 crore people doing higher education. If we assume that quality education would cost about Rs 5 lakhs per student per year, the total money to be spent is Rs. 30 lakh crores. That is pretty much the entire receipts of the central government in a year, and this is the money needed only for higher education. Clearly, it is not possible to have free high quality university education for all in India. A vast majority of Indian youth is dependent on private sector to get college education and cannot afford this level of costs.

Note that the current solution to this problem is to provide quality education to a few who can do well in various entrance exams for a few top government institutions and to provide quality education to a few who can afford a few institutions in the private sector. Many of the resourceful people go abroad to get that quality education. Everyone else gets poor quality education. How do we change this.

We need to work on two sides. One, reduce the cost of providing quality education. And two, do some financial jugglery to match the expenses with the income flows. All universities have an incentive to reduce their costs and become more competitive. So I am not going to talk about that in this blog. Suffice to say, we need to use technology for this - online education, simulators, virtual labs, and so on. But the interesting problem is to enable a student from under-privileged background to get quality education in private sector.

The tuition and other expenses of the student can be borne through five channels:

1. Government subsidies
2. Private philanthropy
3. Cross subsidy through resource generation by the university
4. Payment through current incomes and savings by the student/family
5. Delayed payments (in some sense, like loans) 

Let us discuss how we can innovate in all these five channels to ensure that a much greater number of people in the country have access to quality education. Note that dependence on only one channel may not suffice when the gap between costs and income is very large.

The first issue is how government subsidies can reduce the burden on students. As we have said in the beginning, our current public finances do not allow every student to be financed for quality education. But it is certainly possible to expand the current support. As of now, government provides scholarships to students from under-privileged backgrounds (even if they study in private institutions), and also some scholarships for board toppers, etc. It is definitely possible to expand this to more students. May be government can provide graded support like top 5% in all boards get a scholarship of Rs 2 lakh per annum, next 5% getting Rs. 1.5 lakh per annum, and so on. There can be other models. If you need additional help, the government can have schemes like the graduates will have to work for the government for X number of years after graduation, or will have to serve in rural or less popular geographies, and so on. Support from government will reduce dependence on other channels of funding, particularly payment through savings/incomes and payment through loans.

The second channel of support is private philanthropy. A large number of US universities have huge endowments that goes into billions of dollars with Harvard at the top with 50 billion USD of endowment. Princeton gets 55% of its alumni donating regularly. We need to create a similar culture of giving gifts to educational institutions in India. Government can help in this. The tax incentive needs to be rationalized. Currently, donations to IITs and other central government institutions get 100% tax exemption, but donations to universities like JKLU only get 50% tax exemption. This discrepancy should go and all educational institutions should get 100% tax exemption. In US, it is very common for industry to match individual donations. This needs to be encouraged in India too. Companies should be able to match donations by their employees through their CSR kitty (perhaps even otherwise). The process to support education through CSR funds should be smooth. At JKLU, we get a majority of our funding from such donations (and not tuition money), and hence able to keep our fees reasonable, but we are a rarity. Most universities manage their budget only through tuition income.

The third channel of resource generation by the university is an interesting one. The most common thing is research funding by the government (and sometimes by industry too). In India, the overhead on research project is so little that every research project is a loss to the university. Of course, it is much better to do research through government support than to use tuition income in research. But the government really needs to increase the overhead very substantially. This will encourage all universities to do better research and if not cross subsidize tuition, at least not use tuition money for research. The other common revenue stream is continuing education programs. Unfortunately, till now, only management schools have been able to generate substantive revenues through this route and that too only a few privileged ones. But I think if universities really focus on this, they can get a decent revenue stream through this route. Other revenue streams institutions have tried include setting up research parks, having commercial establishments on campus, generating and leveraging IPRs, etc. But frankly, this channel hasn't really helped reduce tuition burden in any substantive way in most institutions. Of course, all universities have a bit of cross subsidy through the system of scholarships. But scholarships are meant for a variety of reasons like academic performance, performance in sports and so on, and therefore, means-based scholarships can cover only a small number of students.

The fourth channel is of payment through savings and current incomes in the family. In this channel, the innovation that can be done is to provide well paying campus jobs to students, particularly in the vacation period, but even part-time during the semesters. For example, at JKLU, we provide some campus jobs at a rate of Rs. 200 per hour only to financially needy students. The government can introduce small savings scheme which are meant to be encashed only at the time of college education and are attractive in terms of rate of interest and income tax applicability.

There is another way to self-finance education which somehow is not taken positively in India. What is the need to do a 4-year program in four years. It would be of immense educational value to the student if s/he takes a semester off, works in industry and returns to the university. This would provide a deep insight on what is the need of the industry, what does the student likes and dislikes, and on return to the university, can take electives accordingly. This system is of value to everyone, but for someone with poor financial status, this can earn moneys to sustain education and have less dependence on other channels like loans.

The fifth channel of delayed payment is what most people talk about to enable quality education to financially weak families. And the most common instrument for this is a loan. But there are other possibilities as well that we will talk about a little later in this article. The system of education loans has serious limitations.

The first limitation of an education loan is that of a guarantee or a collateral. Students from under-privileged backgrounds aren't able to provide either a collateral or a guarantor. And hence banks are often reluctant to offer loans to those who need them the most. Government has mandated that upto a certain amount, the education loans need not have any collateral or guarantee. But in the absence of these, getting repayments from even well-to-do become an issue sometimes.

The second limitation is that students who do not get a good enough job struggle to repay the loan and that stress keeps on growing. In fact, in some cases, the graduating students feel compelled to take up jobs that they won't like only because they are paying better. If a student wants to work in social sector (NGO) or if someone wants to go for higher studies, the loan repayment becomes a bigger challenge.

A related problem to repayment is the concept of EMI - the Equated Monthly Installments. Payments in terms of EMI makes no sense for a recent graduate and that too in a medium or high interest economy. A recent graduate typically starts with a low salary and after a couple of years of experience starts climbing the corporate ladder with higher pay. In the initial part of the career, the EMI is extremely difficult to pay and defaults happen, while it would be much easier to pay the same amount when the pay has doubled. The EMI concept requires the borrower to pay the entire monthly interest and some part of the principle. On the other hand, if we allow the borrower to pay only the real interest (interest rate minus inflation), then the loan amount is essentially remaining the same for the first few years while the capacity to pay is improving and hence the person will be able to pay it much more easily.

If I have a loan of Rs. 10 lakhs when my income is Rs 5 lakhs, the lenders have a certain risk. Assuming that the inflation is 5%, the rate of interest is 11%, and my income increases by 10% in a year. If I pay 6% (or Rs. 60,000 in the year), I have a loan of Rs. 10.5 lakhs next year while my income is Rs. 5.5 lakhs, the lender's risk has actually come down as my capacity to pay even the increased amount has improved. So we need to have an Increasing Monthly Installments or IMI instead of EMI.

In terms of collateral, one possibility is to use the degree certificate as collateral. For this to happen, there will have to be a tripartite agreement between the student, university and the lender. The university will not provide the degree certificate to the student till the loan is paid off. Yes, any time, the student takes up a job, the new employer can directly ask the university to verify the degree status. In fact, if we can make it a legal requirement for all large employers to seek either a copy of the degree or a copy of the loan agreement, and if there is a loan agreement, the employer agrees to deduct an agreed upon amount and pay it to the bank, this will further reduce the risk of default.

There are other possibilities that various fintech startups can explore. For example, it is not necessary that the loan is to be sanctioned at the time of admission only. A nimble player can have an agreement with a university that the university will share all data (anonymized for privacy reasons) of placement in an honest fashion (which many universities will refuse, but universities like JKLU would love it, and I am sure others will fall in line when their students are disadvantaged in the loan market). The university will also share the current transcript and any other relevant details of the loan applicant. Let us assume that this loan application is being made after the first year of college. Now, the lender can make a much better guess about the potential earning of this student after graduation and hence can sanction loan based on potential.

In fact, universities can help further by delaying the payment of first year tuition. One can seek tuition later in the program, say after the first year. Now, the student can be evaluated by the potential lender, an amount can be sanctioned based on that potential and the university can be paid first year fee and the future fees at that time. It is already happening for very short term courses like six months courses. The provider provides education without asking for upfront payment. At the end of the course, if the student gets a job, there will be lenders who can sanction loan which is paid to the education provider. (Check: Masai School.)

We mentioned earlier that there are possibilities of delayed payments other than loans. One of the prominent ones emerging in the world is an income sharing agreement or ISA. Under an ISA, the student agrees to pay a certain fraction of his/her income to the lender after the graduation. The agreement would typically mention a minimum income level below which no payment will be made. It will also mention the period for which this agreement is valid. And in case the student gets a very high salary, the agreement would typically state the maximum amount of money that the student will have to pay. So different people will pay different amounts depending on their incomes but noone will pay an inordinately large amount. Of course, the details will depend on what the two parties agree with and what the law permits in that jurisdiction.

Many people (and governments) are uncomfortable with ISAs because it seems unfair that different people are paying different amounts and that the person with the best jobs are effectively paying a very high rate of interest. It is possible that if someone does not understand the implications of the agreement or was forced by his/her circumstances to sign such an agreement, s/he will end up paying a very large sum in case of an excellent job. But if there can be legal safeguards to avoid exploitation such as model ISAs, this is an interesting model of financing higher education.

Yet another way of delayed payment is through differential taxes. This is like an ISA between a student and the government. The government can say that everyone seeking substantial government subsidy (like studying in a university well funded by the government) will pay, say, 2% extra income tax for a pre-defined period of time. Again, this would mean that if the income of the person is below the taxable limit then the person does not pay this extra amount also.

So the take away is that there are a large number of models for financing higher education. A poor country like India should not think of a single model like loan. A combination of several models is what is most likely going to work for us.