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.