For Indian students, there are a multitude of career options to choose from these days. Forty years ago, higher education choices were limited to a meagre few: Science, Arts and Commerce in high school; Engineering, Medicine, Science, Arts and Commerce in college. Law, Accountancy, the Indian Administrative Services, and Business Management came thereafter as post-graduate options.
Studies, or studying, meant memorising stuff from books and lecture notes before ‘vomiting’ it all out in long and arduous exams. Students practised answering hundreds of questions and ‘solving’ test papers from years past, with the hope that their exams will contain some of those questions, making it easier for them to score higher marks. Students intent on scoring well in exams simply crammed and crammed their brains with study material and ‘vomited’ it all out when the time came.
It was a test of memory. Students who could retain facts, figures and processes in their brains scored well in their exams. There was no test of skill or problem-solving or application of knowledge. Those students who could actually apply themselves to the best of their abilities and solved problems that mattered in their professional life didn’t necessarily do well. It was something like remembering a whole lot of ‘statistics’ on cricket matches, players and their performances; it didn’t matter if you could play cricket or not.
Image courtesy ibnlive.in.com and AP
Some high school students joined the Indian Defence Services or the merchant navy; but these options were limited to boys. Since there were so few career options to choose from, academic and career paths were more or less set for the students. Nobody cared for career counselling for students or for administering aptitude tests to evaluate student aptitudes and abilities to perform well in specific academic fields or careers later on. If students got into a good college and found themselves a job after graduation or post-graduation, they considered themselves lucky.
That was the state of education in India forty years ago – and it continues in this manner in much of India even today. The marginally-few ‘bright’ students applied their minds and, with the support of their families and part-scholarships, pursued a foreign education. They, typically, chose university programmes in USA and in the UK, never to return to India again. There was a hue and cry about ‘brain drain’ by economists and policymakers, before private institutions and some Indian universities began offering new curricula and research options to attract the ‘bright’ students and retain them in the country – not just in colleges and universities, but also in the workforce.
Of course, the ‘bright’ students still left the country for a foreign education; but the new curricula initiative attracted the general (mediocre) student population into new fields of study and careers. Some of these students did rather well too. It began tentatively in the early eighties with computer education, which blossomed into a fast-growing private-sector industry before the 1980s were over. Education came to be recognised as an industry sector, a business making profits, albeit with private players building the industry. It hasn’t looked back since.
Over the years, with private investment, many professional training institutes, colleges and universities have come up. They offer many more fields of study for academic and career pursuits than what was on offer as higher and tertiary education forty, thirty or even twenty years ago. With liberalisation and globalisation opening up the economy, Indian businesses flourished, demanding many more people with many more skills in the workforce. Education became a sought-after commodity and, with more money in the hands of the Indian middle-class, many more students were able to choose their fields of study and careers from many more institutes of education… in India and abroad.
Let's Talk by Sunita Bose 