On a wing and a prayer
Indian students' journey to an International school. The trials and tribulations.
Nearly 2.2 million students from India travelled abroad for higher studies in the five years leading up to 2021. In 2019, a whopping 0.6 million (5,88,391 to be exact) set off to pursue their dreams.Understandably, the number plunged in 2020 but it has picked up again this year. Have a look at the complete state wise breakup here.
We decided to look into the process followed by the students and their parents in the journey, which we understood takes a full 30 months or so. We spoke to four sets of youth and their parents. The four were on their way respectively to Sciences Po, Le Havre campus; University of Toronto; McMaster University; and University of Southern California.
First serious thoughts
“School starts getting serious in 9th grade. 9th/10th okay my scores matter. Because most universities ask for your grades from the 9th grade onwards. So, by then you are like..okay, I need to get my school work in order.”
“I started thinking about what I wanted to do or like even about college in. I think it was towards the end of the eighth grade, because we had to choose whether we wanted to do the IGCSE or the ICSC in the in the 10th grade. So I think that that is the first time I thought about college because it does play some sort of role in terms of what options you..”
“So I think that's an important thing to say that the process of thinking about it started early because of the environment of school.”
“Initial interest was in music. But by the time class 12 rolled around, I realized that I wasn’t really as interested in music anymore as I was about subjects like History and Political Science. That’s when I realized that I wanted to do Social Sciences subjects like History and Political Science.
Around summer of class 12, around June or so…that’s when I started looking at colleges for the first time. “
There are multiple segments: early starters, late boomers, parent driven. Each segment’s needs for support (and the intensity) at different points of the journey could be quite different.
What do I want to study
“But what I want to do with my career or with my life, I still don’t know for sure. But you start looking at it after the summer in the 10th grade. Some people have an inkling from before but most of us after the 10th grade for 11th/12th, you have to choose your subjects, right..and certain careers and certain college courses require you to take certain subjects.”
“Our school counsellor gave us a whole list of like basic requirements that you needed for this career or that university that's how I think I've been introduced to it. She gave a form with each country and their subject requirement by course.”
“..I just chose it as a way to streamline my ideas and career options in the future. And after that you start looking at courses that you might want to do. For me, it was a process of elimination because I didn’t know what I wanted to do but I knew what I didn’t want to do. I knew I didn’t want to medicine so I chucked off those subjects but currently I am interested in health sciences so I kept biology.”
“I had gone through multiple psychometric tests to understand what I am good at and just to guide you towards a good field. I got my test results at the end of 11th grade. So I saw what I was good at and what were my core skills. I narrowed down my field to Engineering.”
“So I've always been very into like health and fitness, about the human body. So I knew that maybe at university I might want to study something like nutrition or like human movement or something to do with the human body in terms of the sciences. So that's why when I was picking my IB subjects I try to keep that in mind.”
While the age-old phenomenon of not being sure of what one wants to do post grade XII persists, the awareness certainly is much higher and students quickly narrow down to their broad areas of study. That becomes the lens through which all information is processed and the counsellor influences this choice significantly.
Choosing the universities
Country or University: What comes first?
“In the US you can do any course with any qualifications and shift, probably for the first two years..so you have two years to figure out what you really want to do..
In Canada you have some flexibility, about half of what the US gives..movement in the same faculty is easy. So, Life Sciences is in the faculty of Arts and Scienecs, so I can easily move to Economics.
The UK doesn’t let you move majors, don’t let you transfer at all..UK and India are the same.”
“Off the bat, I wrote off the US – I had written off the US few years ago, whether or not I was going to be doing music because those tuition fees weren’t something that I wanted to pay and I didn’t want to live in the US either. The UK was similarly quite expensive as well so I wasn’t very inclined towards it.
So I started looking at other parts of the world.
In class 12, India was the most obvious option, doing my undergraduate here and then going abroad for post grad. That was the most obvious option. But then there’s this friend of my parents, who is an alumni of Sciences Po (Le Havre) in France. He was the first one to make me realize that going to Europe to study might be an alternative option that I hadn’t actually heard of because no one talks about going to Europe.”
Indians like the idea of studying in the UK but at the undergrad level flexibility wins as most students are too young to be really sure of what they want to do. So, US and Canada win out.
The DIY segment
“Another thing to note is that I didn’t go to any external counsellors because on one hand they are incredibly expensive and I thought that anything a counsellor could do, I figured I could do myself. If you spend enough time on the university websites, if you look up their requirements and you look up their deadlines, you honestly can keep track of it yourself as long as you are organized enough. So that’s how I went about it myself.”
“I started looking into Europe and I went about it in a very systematic way. I googled top 10 universities for Pol Science in this country and that way I figured out the best countries. I realized the standard of education in Europe is very high so it didn’t matter necessarily of which country you applied to. Its really up to you about which college fits your profile the most.”
The Counsellor Effect
I went to a career counsellor who helped me to understand what kind of statistics would a university like to see. So if you are applying to an Ivy League university, you have to get 35 in SAT, above 40 in your IB – 40 out of 42 in your IB and many other extracurricular. Just below a top 20 or top 30 university, you might have like a 38/39 out of 45. You might need a 33/34 on your ACT. He made me understand that and on the basis of those requirements of the colleges and my own stats, I could decide my list.”
Parent Speak: “For us, it was a very conscious decision to go with a counsellor. Its such a big decision and rather than being a panic mode, it is very comforting to have someone guide you. With his experience, he can really suss out the match. Its not just the academic scores or the entrance exam scores, its really the profiling of the student and the essays. I think knowing my son’s profile and what could seem to be a good match or how do you increase your probability of the admission. The counsellor had a lot of stats and was referring to a book – US News for rankings, size of the university, acceptance rate, scores at which students are accepted. He may have a better judgment of these numbers than what is put up on the websites. He’s in touch with all the admission reps.”
First party speak, Social Media and Blogs
“We felt that getting information from students currently in the university played a very big part it really helped us in choosing, evaluating the university system. They know what's good, what's bad.”
“..you can go to Reddit, there are always people talking about the schools and then they'll be like, you can DM me. If you have any questions then you can dm them on Reddit and then you can continue the conversation on Instagram if they're willing to give you their Instagram handle. So I met most of the current students in the schools that I applied to through Instagram and I spoke to like a couple of them on Instagram and most of them seem to be really helpful..”
Rankings
“When you look at overall ranking, it doesn’t necessarily give you a perspective for that particular course ranking. Like for civil engineering, the ranking differed significantly from the overall ranking of the univ.
For civil engineering, UIUC is tied with for the 1st place with University of Berkeley. But if you look at overall rankings then UIUC is 48th or 47th. So the reason for such disparity is because the univ decides to put more resources in a particular field over others.”
“But the ranking system can be manipulated a lot. One can’t really gauge the quality of faculty. The best site to see the quality of teachers is a website called ratemyprofessor.com or something like that.”
“Nothing specific. Standard places – THE, QS. In your search, you can narrow it down to a continent.”
“there’s too much information, you have top universities for this..for that..every list is different..”
“..the research also included looking at blogs also included looking at rankings, it also included looking at the university websites themselves to sort of understand what their program was offering and what they were trying to teach with these programs”
“The biggest thing was job opportunities and after that probably the environment – learning environment, weather, social life, the size of the batch, fraternities, quality of dorms etc”
Rankings play an important role in the shortlisting puzzle, specific course level rankings are important and career opportunities play a big role. However, there is ‘too much information’, implying perhaps there is no single reliable source of information.
Getting ready
“Our school is very systematic about the way they apply. They tell us exactly which documents are required universally across the board. So there is your letter of recommendations, your essays (different countries have different requirements of essays), English proficiency test etc.
In August, our school told us to decide which subjects we wanted our letters of recommendations for and to reach out to those teachers so that they could have their LOIs ready by the time the application process starts. So I spoke to my History and English teacher and I got that sorted. Then I took the English proficiency test – I took the TOEFL.”
“I went through mainly the rankings of engineering as a whole which are available on many sites and books etc. and then the rankings for my field i.e. civil engineering. I kind of combined both of them.
After tabulating these universities, I then worked on some core projects and show my worth outside of simply grades. So then I started working on my extracurricular and started doing courses.”
“So I began reading an insane amount – about politics, history, even economics even though I struggle with economics. My interview was two days before my English literature ISC board exam and in that week leading up to the interview and the board exam I was alternating reading The Tempest and reading my interview prep material. It was very hectic. Then the interview happened in February and it was far more relaxed than I could have imagined.”
Clearly, schools plays a critical helping role in the logistical process, and students put in a lot of work beefing up their CVs, essays and preparing for interviews.
Finalise universities, apply and the final choice
“..so he actually reached out to year three students. Most of these conversations were with year two and three students. So, you know, in your maybe 70-80 students,, half of them are gunning for medicine, through these conversations, he got a lot of information..
we really did a lot of work..somehow if this was offered to students on some platform where they can reach out to other students, and that information is available, it would make it so much simpler..”
“..the thing I was talking about the information on the websites where it told you the career options or what the graduates of this program had done after they finished, I think if more universities offer that information, it will be really helpful because I found that maybe two or three of the websites of the seven schools that I applied to provided that information’’
“But I also think that if, if universities could offer a platform where they could connect you with students who are currently in that program. It would save a lot of time. Because although I did manage to connect with a decent amount of people, I spend a lot of time doing so looking for people to connect with. It's not the easiest thing to do. It's it has become significantly more convenient because we have social media. Yeah, but it have a platform that the universities offering. It's a much quicker and much more efficient way of actually getting in touch with people who you want to talk to.”
So, what did we make of all this talk. These were our observations (please keep in mind that we have spoken to four sets of youth-parents)
Getting into a foreign university is a long, arduous process
There are significant costs involved even before getting admission
The final cost of education makes it almost compulsory to make significant investment in an external counsellor or in personal time of the entire family
Starting off information is provided by the school
However, most of the critical decisions are based on scattered information or reliant on one individual’s knowledge (the counsellor). Whose fees start at USD 3000
Social media is a critical element in connecting aspiring students with current students in target universities (this is the most valued source of information).
UK universities seem to be at a disadvantage at the undergrad level because on the course inflexibility.
Information (and ranking) through the lens of a particular course if more important than the overall ranking.
Universities could play a larger role in connecting current students to the aspiring ones and by providing more data on post course-career placements.
Looks like an area full of problems to solve and explains the rush of startups entering this space in India.
Hope they have done their homework well.
This is only half the story Suprio! Once admitted (which for a majority of Indian students is mostly achievable these days either at US, UK, Canada, Singapore, HK or Australia) the second part of the struggle starts for most middle-class parents, which is the loan process - choice of bank, rates of interests, inordinate documentation and meaningless procedures, to name a few, tests the limits of one's patience. Maybe you should talk about this in some later edition of the Slice!