Access to Higher Education in India

In India, if you want to get into a top tier university, all you need to do is crack the national level entrance exam — be it JEE, NATA, NEET, etc.

However, in order to crack these exams, one needs to go to coaching institutes, pay lacs of money and prepare hard and then also be lucky on the exam day to land up that 5 digit rank out of millions of students who apply.

So, the model is heavily criticized because:

1. The process is not inclusive and students with higher resources at disposal will have higher chances of cracking these exams. There is enough literature that inform us that students from higher income higher caste families are more probable to clear these entrance exams.

2. If a student is good in studying and solving math, physics and chemistry, does that mean the student will be a good engineer? Of course, one needs a foundational understanding of these subjects but after that it becomes more about interest, vision and aspirations. So, do entrance exams like JEE really help us identify great engineers?

Let’s also talk about universities in the US (our policies are progressively shaped by the US system). There are multiple factors that guarantee your admission in top colleges in the US. We have enough articles that detail how US colleges have an holistic application process. They don’t just look at the grades and standardized test scores (SAT/ACT), but also at the extracurriculars, work/internship experience(s), projects/research, leadership endeavor(s), and above all, how you have given back to the society (community work).

However, who can access and afford these experiences? One needs to build their “profile” to get admission in these universities but how does a student know what needs to be done in order to build their profile? There are consultants who help students to build that profile but again who can access these consultants and how many students can we really help?

Now, GER in higher education is ❤0% in India. And we are progressively finding ways to increase enrolment as well as increase the quality. Most students go to IIT not because they want to be an engineer but because they want to be an IITian and because they were good at PCM. And that’s why we see a huge number of students changing their field after graduation — rather we would want more students to take up research in engineering.

So, if we want to create an admission process:
1. that is inclusive: Students from different socio-economic backgrounds have equitable chances to get admission
2. that helps us find students who are passionate about engineering (or any other domain) as a space (specifically CS, Electrical, etc.)

What can we do? Does the US model work for us? Do we have any other models to learn from? Any innovations we can think of in this space?