Super 30 founder on why opening more IITs won't help
In the last 13 years of my teaching IIT aspirants; I have seen every successful candidate from Super 30 struggling for a few microseconds to figure out what to do next at the time of results, before of course breaking into a smile.
But on June 18 when the result of the joint entrance exams (JEE) advanced 2015 was declared, I was surprised to see Dhananjay, one of the successful candidates, crying inconsolably. Son of a poor villager in Bihar's Samastipur district, he had stolen Rs 50 from his father and travelled without ticket to my home in Patna to be admitted to Super 30 programme. He was crying because he didn't know how he would pay the tuition fee.
India will ultimately overtake China as the world's largest population with a gradually expanding middle class spurred by GDP annual growth. This is already leading to a rapidly swelling demand for higher education. But beyond the middle class, the challenge for our higher education system, which is intrinsically designed to cater only to the elite, is to open doors to the ordinary.
The challenge for the higher education system is to make it inclusive and accessible to everyone without relaxing the quality of education. It will not happen with quick fix solutions like opening of new IITs.
Nobody is arguing for lowering the standard of the exam to incorporate students from the "other" India. Selection should be on merit alone. But students from the underprivileged classes must also be adequately trained to enable them meet specific standards of the IITs. The fear that the system is loaded against the underprivileged is not misplaced. A scrutiny of the results of successive joint entrance examination (JEE) for IITs has revealed that distribution of students who made it to the elite technical institutions is highly skewed in the favour of the haves, who of course cannot be blamed for their achievements.
Students from urban India, higher-income families and those with access to coaching have enjoyed greater success rate than those from the "other" bracket. In the 2012 joint entrance examination (JEE) for IITs, those from families having a higher annual income slab of over Rs 4.5 lakh had the highest success ratio at 10.3 per cent, across all categories. Those in the middle income group of one lakh rupees to Rs 4.5 lakh had a success ratio of 4.8 per cent. Those whose parents annually earned less than one lakh rupees had the lowest success ratio of a 2.6 per cent. These figures cannot be used to make sweeping conclusions; but at least these are indicative of the simple fact that students from families earning more are better prepared.
Similarly, an analysis of 2013 results shows that three of every four students shortlisted for the Indian Institutes of Technology were from just two of the country's 29 school boards. Those who cracked the IIT-JEE Advanced in 2013, as many as 56 per cent were from the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) and 17 per cent from the Andhra Pradesh Board of Intermediate Education (APBIE). Together, they account for 73 per cent of the successful students. If nothing else, it suggests that students from these two boards were better prepared than others in the country. The question is; can we afford such a trend to continue?
The selection process for IITs requires a student to have a solid foundation. But the supply-demand gap of education providers at the micro level is the biggest handicap for aspiring students.
The low rate of enrolment from backwater districts in higher education courses, including the IITs, cannot be seen separately from the low quality of teaching and learning available in their hometowns. A chronic shortage of quality faculty, poor teaching methods, absence of scrutiny and lack of assessment of teaching standards at middle and high school levels; coupled with lack of accountability and quality of those tasked to oversee learning in government schools, has left small town students handicapped.
India is likely to be the world's third largest economy by 2020. But the growth has always been uneven; creating a growing disparity between those who have access to better life chances, and those who do not. The growth in economy expands the middle class bracket, enabling a larger number of people to pay fees for higher education. But the bigger challenge is that it fans aspiration, creating a huge number of first generation learners demanding access to higher education. The system must create enabling opportunities for the desiring youth to become deserving. If we leave them unattended and unaddressed, it will create social unrest in the country whereas helping the have-nots will let India acquire cutting edge and competiveness.
The high expectations of first generation learners and their parents have made them restless. On the other hand, IITs have reduced the number of attempts to two. A majority of students from backwater villages - no matter how good they are - spend a good deal of time trying to learn English and understanding the nuances of the entrance test. They exhaust their chances by the time they are half-prepared.
The economic and demographic churn calls for an unprecedented transformation. Instead of forcing the Dhananjays to run away from their homes, the authorities must grow them into good engineers.