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

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 their child is one of the largest expenses over time.

And yet, school education is slowly becoming (or perhaps being made) irrelevant in the next step that comes after that: college.

The schools-exams-college “chain” is broken. Perhaps because it is now the school-private-coaching-exams-college chain. And your school education is not going to cut it for you to make the cutoff, as millions line up to clear the exam every year.

Private coaching is how you manage to get into the school, 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 $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, including central boards like ICSE/CBSE, bigger cities, boys, and families with higher incomes.

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

And to discuss this, hosts Rohin Dharmakumar and Praveen Gopal Krishnan were joined by three guests.

Maheshwer Peri is the founder and CEO of Careers 360, a company that helps hundreds of millions of students each year explore career plans. Mahesh has been an investment banker with SBI Capital Markets and was with the Outlook group for 17 years, including heading it for more than 10 years.

Sumeet Mehta, co-founder and CEO, LEAD Group. LEAD Group offers school edtech solutions across 8000 schools in India, which in turn touch 3.5 million+ students.

Nitin Pai, our third guest, is the co-founder and director of the Takshashila Institution,  an independent think tank and school of public policy based in Bengaluru.

Additional listening:

How fair are entrance exams?

Welcome to episode six 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 do that through the lens of a 2×2 matrix!

This episode of Two by Two was produced by Anushka Mukherjee. Hari Krishna is the lead writer and researcher for this episode. Rajiv C N, our resident sound engineer, is the audio producer.

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