Undergraduate courses: Younger Indians head abroad

Sahil Peres, 17, will not be joining the rat race, which starts around this time every year as the board exams draw to a close. For many that’s a signal to prepare for the usual round of entrance tests for professional courses. But Sahil will be joining the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in September for a major in computer science.
“I had wanted civil engineering first but then wanted to change,” he says. His minor subject is music. Sahil will be 18 in September.

Nineteen-year-old Drishti Pillai has volunteered at hospitals, is involved in breast cancer research with professors and is pursuing double degrees in biology and psychology as a second-year student at Ohio State University. She wants to go to medical school and become a spine surgeon.

Nakul Beri, 18, is majoring in mechanical engineering at Cornell University. But he’s doing a bit more than that. “Last semester I took a class on the psychology of consumers, this semester I am taking a history class on global Islam and in the future, I plan to study interesting areas such as wineology,” he says.

Sahil, Drishti and Nakul represent a trend — Indians heading abroad to study are younger than ever before. Typically, they are 18 and fresh out of school. And Indian parents seem increasingly willing to shell out a few lakhs and more for the phoren tag.

Why is this happening? A major reason is the flexibility offered by foreign universities, especially those in the US. The young Indian headed abroad after class XII does not want an ordinary Indian BA degree or the stress of IIT or medical college entrance exams. Piyush Aggarwal, director of Abroad Education Consultants (ABE), says there are other reasons for this trend — it is hard to get admission to India’s few good professional institutes; disposable incomes are rising and educational bank loans are easy to secure. Aggarwal says there has been a 15-20 % increase year on year in undergraduate student applications for foreign courses. Favoured destinations are the US, UK, Australia, Canada and now Singapore.

Shakuntala Rao, professor of communication and journalism at State University of New York, says “the most important factor is the emergence of a wealthy Indian middle class which can now afford to send their children abroad for education.”

Sunil Pillai, Drishti’s father, has dispatched his other daughter, Disha, to the US as well. He says it is expensive — Rs 8.5 lakh per quarter. “I can afford it and they get to do things that they want. Drishti can do medicine with astrophysics if she wants. Disha is doing risk management with finance,” he says.

Dr Nandini Rastogi in Kanpur decided on Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore for her son Raghav, because it was relatively close to India. “The cost (around Rs 3.5 lakh a year) is almost half of what it would be in the US or UK. The university also offers student loans at 0% interest. Also, it’s Asian culture and relatively safe.” Raghav, who is pursuing a Bachelor’s degree in computer science at NTU, says it was ideal for him. “To get admission into the top colleges in India is really difficult because the entrance exams are fiercely contested.

As a result, foreign universities like NTU, which offer you the same quality of education along with a lot of practical application as well as exposure to world standards in terms of both academics and sports motivated me to apply there.” Rajvir Handa, whose son Vir is studying industrial engineering at Georgia Institute of Technology in the US, says that 60 of his son’s 90 school classmates headed for college abroad. Nakul agrees that this is increasingly the way things are for Class XII students. “Studying abroad is highly encouraged in my school (Modern School).

From my batch, there are about 15 students in the US and many in UK, Singapore, and other English-speaking countries.” But what does this new, younger brain drain mean for India ? Do we gain — better educated, well-trained young professionals, something that is crucial for a country that boasts a youth bulge but cannot provide everyone a good education? Do we lose — younger people with the initiative to take risks? Shakuntala Rao of New York State University says this is hardly a brain drain in the classic sense of the term.

“India (and China) has always been concerned with the idea of the ‘brain drain’ but it has never panned out the way that people had originally thought when the first wave of immigration started in the 1960s.” She points out that India’s “wealthy and growing diaspora” has helped the mother country in all sorts of ways. “Academics and professionals (doctors, engineers, lawyers) who live abroad come back and have helped India in different ways. So, I don’t think there ought to be a fear of sending Indian students abroad to study.” Rao adds that young people should be encouraged to study abroad “and it is likely that they will return, in one way or the other, to help India’s economy .”

Many of the young people agree that returning home is always an attractive option. But Drishti points out the need to train in the US after college. “I think it’s the most practical thing to work in the US if I graduate from here. I mean, after investing all that time and money into getting a degree from a US college, it would be a little nonsensical to come back to India and start a career there.” Nakul says that’s the way young professionals think but students from business families follow a different course. “They will always be interested in coming back and giving an international feel to their family business.”