Twelve years of schooling is losing out to private coaching as admission into India’s colleges gets increasingly centralised via entrance exams

by Rohin Dharmakumar

5 min read

School education is a fundamental right in India. An average Indian child spends 10–12 years in school. And for most parents and families, the money they spend on educating children is one of their largest expenses over time. 

And yet, school education is slowly becoming (or perhaps being made) irrelevant for what follows after: college.

“In Delhi, the school education is demonetised.

You want to study further, you need to write CUET [Common University Entrance Test].

Every Delhi student has to write CUET to get into any undergrad programme anywhere in Delhi.

It is so criminal because what is being taught in the school then? And 85% of the students in Delhi are in government schools.

They can’t afford coaching nor go through coaching, right?

And when you now see the demographics of the Delhi University students, you realize that you have disenfranchised a certain set of people because you impose something on them which has not been taught in the schooling system, and someone else who is going through a coaching system is possibly coming through the whole thing.”

That was Maheshwer Peri, the founder and CEO of Careers360, a company that helps millions of students explore career plans. Mahesh was an investment banker with SBI Capital Markets, after which he worked with the Outlook group for 17 years, with 10 years spent heading it. 

He was one of three guests for this week’s episode of Two by Two.

Welcome to episode #8 of Two by Two, The Ken’s weekly podcast that asks the most interesting and often uncomfortable questions on topics we all want to know more about. And we—my co-host Praveen Gopal Krishnan, our guests, and I—do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix. 

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India’s school education system is vast, involving 59 boards, including three at the national level and 56 at the state level. 

Of these, 41 boards manage both secondary and higher secondary exams, while 18 focus solely on one category.

A distinctive feature of India’s education system is the varied syllabi across boards.

While most adhere to the NCERT syllabus, six boards, including those in Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, and West Bengal, continue to follow their own curricula, highlighting ongoing debates about educational standardisation.

“As the child comes into middle school and high school, that’s when parents start to think, what is he/she going to do?

Unfortunately, a lot of people have got down this competition preparation curse all the way down to grade six under the garb of Foundation courses.

One of the byproducts of competition exams being so important to get admission into college is that schools are now offering integrated programmes, which means that you’re not only preparing for board exams, but also doing what they call higher-level math, higher-level science.

So earlier, if it was 11th, 12th grade, it started becoming 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th. Now, it’s starting from grade six.”

That was Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and co-CEO, LEAD School. LEAD School offers school edtech solutions across 8,000 schools in India, which in turn touch over 3.5 million students.

Sumeet was our second guest for this episode.

We were discussing the rise of the centralised entrance exams as the entry gate into a good college. 

This has been true for getting into the IITs and IIMs of the world. You had to attempt JEE and CAT respectively to get through to the next rounds. As Sumeet noted: 

“I think in our generation, we had competitive exams. But if you go back one generation to my father’s generation, just immediately after independence, board exams were actually the criteria to get into higher education.

If you go back to the root, what happened was that the quality of the board exams basically went down, or it just was testing for rote (learning).

Some engineering colleges and medical colleges said they want to set a higher bar and they introduced the entrance exam. 

Everybody (else) basically started to catch on.

So it is a combination of the lack of innovation in the board exams, because if you look at a CBSE or a state board, it basically tests for memory.”

India is currently in a slow but undeniable downward spiral with its school-to-college education system—the best method to not just harness its demographic dividend, but also help poorer families make the socio-economic leap.

The schools-exams-college “chain” is broken. Perhaps because it is now the schools-private coaching-exams-college chain.

And your school education is not going to be enough for you to make the cutoff as millions line up to clear these exams every year. 

Private coaching is how you manage to get into your college, and your actual schooling is just a condition you have to fulfil to sit for the exam. It plays no part in preparing you for the entrance exam.

Private coaching, estimated to be a US$25 billion industry by 2025, is becoming the determinant of a good quality education. Not schooling.

Thus, as entrance exams get centralised, and private coaching becomes the most reliable way to clear them, the results are only accentuating numerous privileges and biases, such as studying in central boards like ICSE/CBSE, being from bigger cities, being boys, and or having families with higher incomes.

Twelve years of schooling—one of the biggest spends for families—is becoming disconnected from college education and jobs.

This can’t be sustainable. Which is why China in 2021 banned private coaching under the “Double Reduction” act. It wanted to reduce both the stress on children and the cost of private education on families. 

Did it work? It pushed coaching underground and made group tuitions disappear, only to be replaced by secret (and more expensive) one-on-one coaching.

“You have a basic screening test for all the kids who want to get into competitive exams. This is just a basic screen test… basic science, basic mathematics, et cetera.

You don’t have to do any test prep. If you’ve done a basic 12th grade in any state board, you should be able to pass this test.

It’s a pass or fail test.

Once you pass it, you get a lottery number. And your IIT, your NIT, and your AIIMS… all these places are awarded to you purely on the basis of random lottery.

You could even have reservations on this, you know? 30% of the seats goes to this category, 40% goes to this. So social justice is maintained.

But to everybody else, it’s just random.

Now, if you’re IIT, currently you’re basking in the fact that the kids who come in are already so smart and worked so hard that you could literally sit in an IIT and not teach anything. Four years later, you will get really good output.

But if it’s by lottery, IITs have to work harder. Now, you’re getting your average at the large sample… you’re getting an average kind of a student. Now, you have to take this average student and make the student extraordinary.

Earn your elite status.

Now you go into AIIMS, you do the same thing. Earn your elite status and bring your students to a higher level. What happens to the other kids who didn’t get in?

A lot of these people will be above average, they’ll have above average expectations, and they’ll go to local colleges.

And then your pressure is on local colleges to improve standards. Because now, better students come to local colleges and your local universities.”

That radical suggestion came from Nitin Pai, our third guest and the co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent think tank and school of public policy based in Bengaluru.

It might sound like a mad notion at first, but in a country where multiple socio-economic divides, geographical divides, and gender biases perpetuate, this might be a method to shake things up.

It doesn’t look likely to pan out because the incentives are not aligned for everyone involved, but it’s a radical thought which says a lot about the higher education landscape in the country.

But giving up on our future is not an option, and as Maheshwer said during our discussion, the only empowerment tool in this country, in any democratic country, is education.

The next episode of the Two by Two podcast will go live on all top podcast platforms next Thursday. If you’d like to listen to the full, subscriber-only version, you should pick up The Ken’s Premium subscription and stream it on our iOS, iPad, or Android apps. A Premium subscription will give you full access to not just our podcasts, but also all our longform stories, newsletters, and infographics.

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Regards,
Rohin Dharmakumar

Rohin is co-founder and CEO at The Ken. He holds an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and an engineering degree in Computer Sciences from the R.V.C.E., Bangalore..