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Indian Students Drop Out for Full-Time Tutoring to Enter Top Universities

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Indian Students

In India, when children enter adolescence, it signals the countdown to the highly competitive “college entrance exam.” This exam is one of the few upward mobility pathways for ordinary people, making competition fierce and leading to significant “involution” among students. As a result, the tutoring industry is particularly developed in some cities, such as Kota, the third-largest city in Rajasthan, which has been nicknamed the “coaching capital.” Nowadays, students in India have taken this competition to a new level: many of them are abandoning formal secondary education and instead enrolling in full-time tutoring classes, focusing solely on exam preparation in hopes of entering prestigious universities.

Competitive Pressure Breeds a Culture of Tutoring

In 2024, 1.4 million candidates in India have registered for the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE), which is the entrance exam for engineering programs. These institutions include 23 prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, with only 17,760 seats available. Additionally, 2.4 million students will compete in the medical entrance exam for 108,000 spots.

Due to the widespread desire among Indian parents to produce doctors or engineers, the limited seats at top universities have led to intense competition, further fueling the booming tutoring industry. Reports indicate that the total market value of this industry is expected to exceed ₹1.3 trillion (approximately ¥110 billion) by 2028, more than double the figure in 2021. The rapid growth of this industry is driven by millions of families hoping for their children to succeed. Many believe that India’s entrance exams are relatively fair and less influenced by corruption or privilege, making them a rare merit-based pathway for social mobility. According to a previous report from The Times of India, Indian families spent ₹250 billion on tutoring in 2020, exceeding one-third of the country’s central government education budget.

Full-Time Tutoring Schools on the Rise

In Kota, India’s renowned “coaching capital,” large numbers of students are skipping secondary education, distancing themselves from family and friends, and abandoning hobbies to focus solely on full-time academic tutoring for the entrance exams in medicine or engineering.

As early as 2022, Saurabh Kumar (a pseudonym), then 14 years old, dropped out of school and moved over 1,100 kilometers away from his hometown to enroll in a full-time coaching school in Kota, preparing for the 2026 JEE. Kumar comes from a farming family, but some of his relatives have risen through careers in medicine, public service, or engineering, inspiring him to follow suit. His dream is to attend an IIT and become an aerospace engineer, setting an example for his younger siblings. “Getting into a prestigious university earns you the respect of the entire village,” he said.

According to retired Jawaharlal Nehru University professor Pathak, these coaching classes focus exclusively on standardized exam preparation, subjecting students to “endless, mechanical problem-solving drills.” In these environments, “nothing matters except the exams.” Students miss out on the joy of scientific experiments, the literary beauty of poets like Tagore and Neruda, and the ability to think critically or recognize that “not everything has only one right answer.”

But behind every successful engineer or doctor in India, there are many “heartbroken children.” A psychiatrist in Kota noted that many parents demand academic excellence from their children—especially those of modest means who have even borrowed money for tutoring. They often say, “We’ve invested so much in you… Everyone knows you’ve gone to Kota for coaching. You can only come home if you become a doctor.” In 2023, at least 26 students in Kota took their own lives, primarily due to academic pressure or parental expectations.

Schools “Idle” and Systemic Issues

The heavy reliance on private coaching schools has rendered formal school education almost irrelevant, leading to the rise of illegal “shell schools” in some areas. Due to academic requirements, students need to maintain a 75% attendance rate and pass final exams to be eligible for entrance exams. However, by paying a fee to these “shell schools,” they can obtain eligibility without attending classes. The Indian government recently attempted to regulate the tutoring industry, for instance by setting a minimum age of 16 for extracurricular tutoring, but such measures have had little effect. A complete ban on external tutoring would likely only drive the industry underground.

The chaos in the tutoring sector is just one symptom of deeper systemic issues in India’s education system, the root of which lies in the scarcity of quality higher education resources. According to Maheshwer Peri, founder of the Indian education portal “Career360,” “We place too high hopes on education, but there’s not enough supply to meet the demand.” For more than five years, India’s education spending has remained at around 3% of GDP, far below the 6% target set by the government in the 1960s. While India is working to establish new IITs and medical schools, the slow pace of construction has raised concerns about declining standards. Pathak believes that India must “rescue education from tutoring centers” and calls for educators, social activists, and parents to jointly promote the creation of high-quality, affordable public universities, where both teachers and students can engage in meaningful teaching and learning. He also suggests reforming the “one exam determines your fate” model.

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