Special Report

Runaway coaching schools boom: Boon or bane?

With India’s rapidly expanding middle class increasingly becoming aware of the market value of high quality professional education — available at throwaway prices in publicly funded institutions — the coaching schools industry has grown exponentially and is being incrementally regarded as a threat to the established academic system. Hemalatha Raghupathi reports

Raj is only one of the hundreds of thousands of bright hopes of aspirational middle class households across the country who are ready to live laborious days and invest heavily by way of time, money and leisure to make it through the golden arches of India’s highly rated IITs and other institutions of repute such as Birla Institute of Technological Sciences (BITS) Pilani, Anna University, Chennai and the National Institutes of Technology offering engineering study programmes. Less ambitious students write the AIEEE, which attracted over 357,000 candidates competing for 9,000 seats in 117 colleges across the country, last year.

The scramble for admission into medical and dental colleges is perhaps even more intense. Over 170,000 students write CBSE’s All India Pre-Medical Test (AIPMT) and pre-dental exams for a mere 1,600 seats offered by the country’s top colleges. Likewise, 7,000 class XII students write the two-hour entrance exam of the National Law School of India University, Bangalore in nine centres countrywide, competing for 80 seats. And come December, around 150,000 college graduates will write the Common Admission Test (CAT) for 3,000 seats in the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and a handful of premier business schools.

Quite clearly despite post-independence India being a centrally planned economy, the supply of professional education institutions hasn’t kept pace with the exploding demand for them. Determined to remain the main providers of higher education at populist highly subsidised prices, successive Central and state governments across the country erected formidable licence-permit-quota barriers to discourage the promotion of private institutes of professional education.

Although, despite the rigours of these barriers, a large number of private sector engineering, medical and business management institutes have sprung up across the country, the great majority of them have been promoted by déclassé influence-peddling politicians and profiteering businessmen innocent of the fundamentals of education provision. For instance the southern state of Karnataka boasts 109 private engineering colleges and Tamil Nadu 222. But the great majority of them demand tuition fees which are disproportionate, considering their lack of sufficiently qualified faculty and collegiate infrastructure. Ditto institutes of business management education. Of the 958 B-schools countrywide, the academic programmes of only 50 are accredited by AICTE (All India Council for Technical Education). Hence the annual stampede for entry into IITs, IIMs, NITs etc, which provide high quality education at subsidised prices.

Natarajan: equal testing rationale

But with demand for admissions far out-stripping supply, private sector educationists and edupreneurs were quick to discern there was profit in methodically tutoring aspirants for the newly introduced common entrance exams. With post-independence India’s rapidly expanding middle class increasingly becoming aware of the market value of high quality professional education — available at throwaway prices in publicly funded institutions — the coaching classes industry has grown exponentially and is being incrementally regarded as a threat to the established academic system. The growing anxiety of middle class parents to see their children through tough entrance exams has led them to pay their way into proven coaching institutes which train their progeny to compete for admission into the very best professional education institutions.

Today the fast-growth coaching schools industry is dominated by 50 major private tutorial firms and companies which together with innumerable medium and small players in the metros and other cities rake in an estimated Rs.3,000 crore annually by way of tuition fees. They advertise heavily and make tall promises of assured success in several entrance exams, luring thousands of students into their classrooms.

By and large, they deliver effective coaching and some tutoring institutes such as Brilliant Tutorials (Chennai), FIT-JEE (Mumbai) and Bansal’s Classes (Kota) have recorded great success rates in terms of IIT and IIM admissions. Typically, the success of a few students admitted into IITs is advertised with great fanfare in newspapers to attract eager aspirants who don’t mind long hours of study, to the exclusion of almost all extra-curricular activities. Yet such is middle class India’s desire to succeed, that even in small towns and cities, coaching schools are bursting at the seams with students ready, willing and able to pay Rs.11,000-27,000 per subject as fees.

Coaching school students in Kanpur: parallel education system

Likewise the Kakadeo locality of the industrial city of Kanpur (pop: 2.8 million), Uttar Pradesh, hosts 75 engi-neering, 20 medical and 15 business management coaching institutes within a two kilometre radius. "These centres are equipped with the best facilities. Many boast air-conditioned classrooms, digital black boards and computerised infrastructure. Teachers are also paid hefty amounts. On an average these institutes charge Rs.11,000 per subject in the engineering stream, Rs.27,500 and Rs.18,000 for medical and management courses, respectively," write Akhilesh Kumar Singh and Namrata Srivastava also in the Times of India (July 3).

The proliferation of coaching schools for all types of public exams and the creation of a high cost parallel education system accessible only to the well heeled, has raised a larger question of considerable social import. Given that tuition in all government owned and managed institutions of higher education is heavily subsidised, a growing number of educationists and liberals in general are beginning to voice serious reservations about an education system which allows relatively affluent students with access to coaching schools to dominate merit lists in common entrance exams. There is growing resentment that children from less affluent households who cannot afford the stinging tuition fees mandated by coaching schools are effectively being denied entry into publicly funded institutions of higher education which demand sky-high average percentages as the pre-condition of admission. Moreover there is increasing public suspicion that powerful coaching centres are suborning common entrance exams through bribery and corruption. (see box)

"The multiplication of coaching institutes has created intense competition among them. So some resort to cheating to produce successful candidates and boost their business. Coaching would be unnecessary if entrance exams were genuinely based on the class XII curriculum. But as long as coaching institutes exist, there is great temptation among parents to enroll their children in them, especially if they lack the motivation to study on their own. Yet the plain truth is that students from poor households cannot afford supplementary coaching. Therefore there is a strong case for the Central and state governments to ban coaching centres which only widen the education gap between the haves and have-nots. The panacea is that school education should be improved and the examination system reformed so that students from all sections of society can tackle common entrance exams without resorting to supplementary tuition," says E Balaguruswamy, former vice-chancellor, Anna University.

Swaminathan: valuable service

Likewise up north in the national capital, Sandeep Gandhi, director of the Sachdeva New P.T. College (estb:1940) also believes that coaching institutes render a valuable service to society. "We help nurture and polish the talent of school leavers. Such supplementary education is required in these competitive times to help canalise the best students into institutions of higher learning. We are proud that more than 20 percent of our students are admitted into the very best institutes of professional education," says Gandhi. One of the largest coaching institutes in India with over 100,000 students registered in its 82 learning centres countrywide, SNPT prepares students for IIT-JEE and medical school entrance exams.

Perhaps inevitably, with competition to attract fee-paying students hotting up to fever pitch and institutes needing to advertise high success rates in terms of admissions into the best colleges and institutions, many coaching institutes are becoming picky about the students they admit. For instance the Delhi-based Akash Institute (estb. 1983) which prepares students for medical school and IIT-JEE exams admits only those with 89 percent plus average in the class X school leaving exams and conducts a screening test of its own to pick the most high potential of its 1,000 students who pay a stiff Rs.54,000 per year for the privilege of being coached by the institute for med school entrance exams.

That coaching institutes are not mere commercially driven teaching shops is also evidenced by the fact that a large number of them offer modestly priced correspondence courses which are invaluable to students in poorly managed, under-served government schools in rural India where teacher absenteeism is an epidemic. For instance Sachdeva New P.T. College and Akash Institute in New Delhi provide IIT-JEE correspondence course material for Rs.3,100 and Rs.8,500 respectively.

Yet the big daddy of correspondence courses is the Chennai-based Brilliant Tutorials promoted in 1970 by political cartoonist N. Thanu in a small tin-roofed shed. Currently Brilliant hires 125 experienced teachers who design and compile the course material for 17 different exams. Presently headed by Thanu’s son T. Neelakantan, an IIT-Madras alumnus, Brilliant services 60,000 students every year delivering more than 6,000 packages (average price: Rs.4,200 per year per student) per day countrywide.

Although the great majority of coaching institutes prepare students for the tough entrance exams of engineering and medical colleges, a growing number are providing graduate students coaching for B-school entrance exams, especially for CAT (Common Admission Test), topping which is the prerequisite of admission in the six IIMs and several other top-rated business management institutes in the country.

Kamlesh Sajnani

Another heavyweight in this segment is the Delhi-based Career Launcher, founded in a small way by IIM-Ahmedabad alumnus Satya Narayanan R in 1995, with just a dozen students training for CAT. Currently Career Launcher has a presence in 51 cities across India and the Middle East and offers career oriented training and entrance exam preparatory education to over 35,000 students annually across south and west Asia. In addition to providing entrance examination training, it partners with schools, universities and education companies to provide a bouquet of top-up support services to their students.

The spectacular success of Career Launcher under Satya Narayanan’s leadership also highlights the reality that a not insubstantial number of India’s much maligned coaching institutes are promoted by highly qualified professionals who know their business and provide value for money to ambitious students. Indeed several IIT and IIM alumni discerning a golden business opportunity in private tutorials, have given up promising careers in industry in India and abroad to promote coaching institutes.

In 2002 Neelesh Asati, an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and IIM-Lucknow who served in several multinationals in India and the US, returned to India to promote Scholars League together with Rangarajan Iyengar, also an IIM-Lucknow alumnus and former marketing manager with HCL Technologies, USA. With study centres in Chennai, Salem and Madurai, Scholars League prepares 1,200 college graduates for the CAT and other B-school entrance exams for fees ranging from Rs.1,500-15,000. "During the past three years 25-30 percent of our students have been admitted into the IIMs. This is because only IIM graduates are hired as faculty in Scholars League, and we have designed carefully structured study programmes. Cracking CAT is not only about answering all the questions in the test paper, it requires the optimal combination of marks in English, mathematics and reasoning ability. We train our students to attain this optimal combination," says Asati.

Coaching school in Chennai: annual stampede

Topping up school leavers’ education and creating well-remunerated jobs for teachers apart, another beneficial fallout of the coaching classes boom is its geographical spread. As indicated earlier, small towns such as Kota and neglected non-metros such as Kanpur are experiencing the multiplier effect in terms of job creation and supplementary incomes for landlords, laundry and restaurant owners. Likewise Trichur (pop. 300,000) in interior Kerala is experiencing boom-like conditions because of P.C. Thomas Classes. A strict disciplinarian, the eponymous Thomas began coaching students in his home in 1965. Today P.C. Classes has a staggering enrollment of 17,000 engineering and medical college aspirants, many of whom are boarders. Every year, 60-70 percent of PCT students are admitted into top-rated engineering and medical colleges across the country. The institute employs 80 teachers in Trichur and has promoted learning centres in West Asia with highly qualified faculty taking home Rs.6-14 lakh per year.

But while it is indisputable that the coaching institutes boom has helped thousands of students to round off their school and college education and enter the best institutes of professional education while simultaneously creating well-paid job opportunities for teachers and business management professionals, visiting faculty and providers of supportive services, there’s no getting around the fact that given their relatively high tuition fee requirement, they exemplify the "commercialisation of education" which is anathema to educationists. Repeated judgements of the Supreme Court have also forbidden its commercialisation.

In the circumstances it is difficult to deny that coaching institutes which benefit only the urban middle class able to afford their high fees, deepen existing education-led inequalities in society. Though most coaching schools claim to offer fee concessions to deserving poor students, even if this claim is verifiable, rural students cannot avail preferential fees as they need to travel long distances to coaching institutes usually located in urban areas, or afford related board and lodging expenses. Therefore the benefits of the coaching schools boom accrue to the relatively affluent whose entry into publicly funded highly subsidised institutions of higher education is facilitated by the nation’s ubiquitous private tutorial establishments.

This is why liberal and left-leaning educationists in particular have few good words to say about coaching institutes which they allege are exacerbating education-led inequalities in society and/ or are suborning examination boards through bribery and corruption. Thus while promoting the draft National Framework 2005 curriculum for school education (see EW cover story July) Prof. Yash Pal promises that the NCF 2005 will end "the proliferation of private tuition and coaching schools which are a cancer within the system". Similarly arguing that common entrance exams and coaching institutes in particular discriminate against rural students, on June 6 Tamil Nadu chief minister J. Jayalalithaa peremptorily abolished common entrance exams as determinants of admission into institutes of professional education in the state. According to her, Plus Two school-leaving mark sheets should be the criterion for admission into all institutions of higher education in the state. On June 7, the Madras high court stayed this order of the Tamil Nadu government for the current year.

Box 2

Student voices

Nirmal Raj (left) with friends

My day would begin at 5 a.m and end at 10.30 p.m. Before and after school I attended coaching classes conducted by three different professors to prepare for the IIT-Joint Entrance Examination. There’s been no time for television or vacations in the past two years. But my efforts paid off as I have secured a seat in IIT-Madras — Nirmal Krishna Raj, first year student at IIT-Madras

I attend the Akash Institute in Delhi to prepare for the all-India medical entrance exam. Self-preparation with the help of books is just not enough. Attending a professional coaching institute trains you to answer questions in the shortest time possible — Arvind Kumar, a student of Andhra Education Society, Delhi, who has just completed class XII

The school syllabus helps you to write the class XII CBSE exam, not the IIT-JEE or any other competitive exam. Extra coaching is absolutely required to think innovatively and answer out-of-the-box questions — Amrutanshu Mishra, a class XII student of the CBSE affiliated SBOA School and Junior College, Chennai

I didn’t attend a coaching school for the entrance exam to St Stephen’s in Delhi nor for the IIT-JEE. My twin sister Aparna who is pursuing her postgraduation in IIT Roorkee also managed without coaching classes. Both of us just put in a lot of hard work at home with a little help from our father — Sreeparna Mukerjee, a postgrad student of chemistry, IIT-Bombay

Though I enrolled in a coaching school — Scholars League — for the Common Admission Test, I didn’t attend too many classes. But I did find their study material and mock tests very helpful. It is impossible to get into an IIM without formal training and preparation. Strategy, and not formulae will see you through CAT — Rishi Thussu, a student of IIM-Bangalore

In principle, Prof. M.S. Ananth director of IIT-Madras agrees that Plus Two marks should be used as the basis of entrance into IITs, IIMs and other colleges. "But nearly 4 million students pass the class XII exams every year and many of them secure very high marks and centums. Hence, selection from similarly ranked students to fill the too few seats in the IITs and top-ranked colleges is very difficult. The better solution is to upgrade the syllabuses and examination systems of schools so that students are equipped to write common entrance exams without recourse to coaching institutions. Simultaneously, to counter the obsession with IIT and IIM education, the quality of other educa-tional institutions has to be improved so that students are willing and happy to study in them," says Ananth.

The latter sentiment is echoed by Dr. M.A. Pai, currently professor emeritus of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Illinois and formerly on the faculty of IIT Kanpur. Pai believes that with minor modifications to their syllabuses and modest additional investment, NITs (National Institutes of Technology) and institutions such as the VJTI (Veer Jijamata Technical Institute), Mumbai, Anna University, Chennai and several others across the country can impart IIT-standard undergraduate education to the ever increasing number of students clamouring for quality engineering education. "A nation of one billion people can afford 25 IITs which will be ranked on their research output and will impart quality undergrad education. This will enable the admission of at least 6,000 more students through the JEE," he suggests.

Sadagopan: supply side augmentation argument

However, useful as they are, these antidotes to high-fee coaching institutes — indeed, a parallel education system — are long-term solutions. They require heavy additional investment in education and careful upgradation of teaching-learning standards in India’s schools and colleges — a long haul. Meanwhile pressure to ban and/ or regulate coaching institutes is mounting and representations to this effect are reportedly falling on receptive ears in the Union HRD ministry and in state capitals. And since the licence-permit-quota regime is flourishing in Indian education, there’s a real possibility of hastily drafted, ill-conceived orders and directives being issued which would drive this business underground and make it even more expensive than it is currently.

Dr. R. Natarajan the knowledgeable former director of IIT-Madras and former chairman of AICTE (quoted earlier) warns against hasty decisions to ban, restrict or regulate private tutorial or coaching institutes. "In the recent past the quality of instruction in schools and colleges has deteriorated significantly due to the inability of schools and colleges to attract the best graduate talent; the ban on teacher recruitment in many states; ad hoc appointment of teachers on contract; declaration of holidays at the drop of a hat which makes it impossible for teachers to complete the syllabus. For all these reasons students and their parents are forced to seek additional assistance from coaching schools. Moreover coaching institutes pay their teachers better, take their responsibilities seriously, strictly adhere to syllabus completion deadlines and provide useful guidance on tackling competitive exams. To develop Olympics and Asian Games athletes, cricket test players, hockey internationals etc, coaching camps in schools are widely accepted. Therefore before contemplating abolition of coaching schools, it’s important to introspect and address the causes of their existence and popularity," warns Natarajan.

Quite obviously until major and deep-rooted reforms are conceptualised and implemented in post-independence India’s long neglected school and college education systems, coaching institutes are here to stay. And flourish.

With Srinidhi Raghavendra (Bangalore); Autar Nehru (Delhi) & Gaver Chatterjee (Mumbai)