In 2007, as a sixteen-year-old, I left home to get coached for a college entrance exam. I am bravely presuming that most of you reading this article did the same. As an obedient teenager, I moved to a new city, lived with random strangers, enrolled in a high school, but most importantly, got into a coaching institute – a shiny false ceiling building with no power outages and way too many lights. The teachers didn’t have names, just abbreviations, first their subject (P, C or M), followed by the initial of the first and last name. (My chemistry teacher was named CCP, which seems like an appropriate name now). And in all their glory were regarded as the reincarnations of gods. Well, not all of them; they had their ranks like the army.

1.    The Prophets: They were the most famous ones, rumored to inject a potion of enlightenment straight into your veins, no matter your brain size. They had the ‘tricks’ to solve questions, and they told stories of the holy grail. “What happens if you add a 95^th pulley into your pulley system?” [contrary to popular beliefs, not much]. Stories of their fame and misogyny can be heard as cute anecdotes across colleges for years.

2.    The Apostles: The good ones, who knew their stuff but did not indulge themselves in the myths and the prophecies of Hogwarts. The ‘I do my work and teach the students how to solve questions’ types. I liked their attitude. Some were kind and did not give a strong cultist vibe that the prophets spread around like glitter.

3.    The Rest: Even though they knew what to do, no one cared about them. They were generally assigned to cadets who didn’t care much in the first place. I don’t know what they did, but the word around the coaching institute was that ‘they could sink your career.’

Of course, none of these ‘ranks’ were strictly based on how effective their teaching was. It was generally a mix of skills and an ability to create a delusion of a fairyland above the clouds, attainable only by flushing 2-3 crucial years of your teenage and a massive chunk of money down the drain. You live for the fairyland, and you die for it; some actually do. But it creates the language, the rituals, and the devotion that sustains the industry. Movies are made about the entrance test; heroes are drawn out of teachers who train students to take the test, a whole ass city is transformed into a training center for those tests. If not for the godmen residing in these halls and the bright advertisement of heaven on billboards above a hoarding for viagra, there will be no devotees, no money, and no need to find out what the 95^th pulley did.

The IITs (wow emoji) pride themselves on a herculean admission test to choose the country’s crème de la crème – the most ‘talented.’ But the rite of passage for the ‘talent’ goes through the above discussed ‘false ceiling buildings.’ If you look at the fee for these coaching centers, the most ordinary ones charge above one lakh per year. The more students they could get into IITs, the higher the price. A recent merger between Akash, a leading coaching institute, and BYJU, an online education startup, was valued at $1 billion. (BYJU has been in controversy recently for trying to suppress online criticism of their educational practices). Imagine that; one of the coaching institutes, out of possibly hundreds, is valued at $1 billion.  For comparison, the total expenditure on education by both state and the central government in 2017-2018 was a mere $100 billion. It’s a growing industry that has now decentralized across India and lures anyone who can afford to be seduced. And sadly, almost all of the students who qualify for the IITs are from one such coaching institute.

 There is a vision every educational institute defines for itself. Apart from the fundamental goal of imparting education, universities and colleges have progressively tried to define themselves as places that nurture students from every stratum of society—an affirmation of educational as well as social responsibility. If you believe that institutes such as the IITs should only aim to produce quality engineers, they have succeeded by and large (even if you disagree, it’s a debate for some other time). If, however, as the IITs themselves seem to believe that the college has a social responsibility to educate people from all backgrounds, as can be seen by the implementation of caste-based reservation, and to be a place for equal opportunity, one has to wonder if that’s what the current admission system is designed to do?

If you look at the income distribution of the country, an overwhelming 76% of the household income is below 5 lakhs per year, with 31% earning below 2 lakhs per year. That is close to 1 billion people (sometimes also termed as the next billion). It is next to impossible for a family of four, making a mere amount of fewer than 5 lakhs per annum, to send their kids to any such coaching center. And I have not included the cost of living and food, and other supporting expenses. This is an inherent problem with the admission design that encourages such coaching monopolies. The IITs do not get the most intelligent of all the students of the country, or even the hardest working. The IITs entrance tests are an exclusive test for the upper-middle class and the rich, and the ones who qualify are perhaps the best in that lot, not the best of the nation. The elitism of the institutes has led them to spawn more elitism, not less. In place of breaking down the class hierarchies, the way their entrance is designed does anything but ensures that the rich remain rich. The dream dies in the 25^th percentile of the household.

 This is not just limited to the IITs, of course. And certainly, there are other methods to break out of the hierarchy (go watch ‘The white tiger’ for other examples), but the larger question remains. Why would an aspiring egalitarian society design stair in a way that the shiny city on the hill remains open only for some? Any admission design – structurally or otherwise – that makes it harder for the underprivileged to be accepted will ensure an increase in income inequality and a decrease in social mobility. This reflects in the social mobility data, the probability of someone born in the bottom quantile of the population reaching the top is merely 3%. The same remains true for occupational matrices. Someone born to a farmer is almost 80% likely to end up either as a farmer or unskilled labor. After independence, the social mobility of the second generation has actually gone down [1]. in his book ‘The Meritocracy trap’ Daniel Morkovit elucidates this phenomenon. He calls it “snowball inequality”: a compounding feedback loop, where the rich monopolize the educational institution for their children, ensuring higher qualification than the poor. This means that their children dominate the high skilled jobs, in turn creating more wealth. (Read the book, it’s really insightful.)

With a hint of jealous amusement, aunties and uncles in our neighborhood often announce the newspaper headlines about the son of a Rickshaw driver or a daughter of a garbage man ‘cracking’ IIT or IAS (another coaching based entrance, but comparatively cheaper). As condescending as these stories sound, they are told as success stories of personal grit and not one of institutional failure. Why shouldn’t the son or daughter of a minimally paid worker deserve the same shot at getting into an IIT as any rich person? Why the shock, why the headline? It’s because they know not everyone gets a fair shot, but admitting that would erase their triumphant stories. So, they make it about personal triumph to give the institution and the rich an excuse to ignore the design flaws and claim that ‘well if she can do it, so can anyone else.’ The day society realizes that everyone has a fair shot, the background of who their father is would stop being a part of the news.  However, if the system is kept the same way, one has to wonder, is education really working as the great equalizer, or has it has morphed into a gatekeeper for the bourgeoisie?

 [1] Terri Chapman, “Social Mobility in India: Determinants and Recommendations for Change,” ORF Issue Brief No. 346, March 2020, Observer Research Foundation.

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/482584/india-households-by-annual-income/ 

Thanks for reading. Let me know if you disagree. I do not know what the solution is, but we must first admit that there is a problem. And merit, as we claim it is both miscalculated and simplified.