India's tuition pandemic needs a cure

Recently, the Chinese government announced a bold, sweeping and almost draconian crackdown on its booming educational tuition sector. Under its new policy, private tutoring businesses have to restructure as non-profit companies. They are banned from listing on the stock market or raising foreign capital. They are prohibited from offering tutoring classes on weekends and school holidays. Parents and students are being encouraged to report schools and teachers who make extra income through private tutoring.The consequences were immediate. Shares of Chinese edtech companies listed abroad crashed, losing value worth tens of billions of dollars or thousands of crores. Many of these companies are staring at bankruptcy.China is no yardstick for policy-making for India. It isn’t a democracy, and a blatant ban like this that destroys major corporations overnight doesn’t augur well for investor sentiment. And yet, we in India need to acknowledge that the overemphasis on tuitions is an issue here as well. While the Chinese solution is not the best one, the underlying problem exists in India too.We drive our kids insane. We make them compete for exams that do not test true talent and operate like a lottery. This isn’t a new issue. Tuition classes have existed in India for decades. I remember my own childhood, where we would sit around the dining table of a neighbourhood aunty, who would cut carrots and other root vegetables for dinner as she helped middle-school students solve square roots. Except now, things are radically different. The carrot-cutting aunty was a tiny enterprise, where she essentially helped us focus to do our homework. Today’s education companies are massive. Even in India, there are some with billion-dollar-plus valuations. They use technology to gain scale and can enter literally every household in India. They market with national campaigns. They could soon institutionalise and make tuitions mainstream to a point where the same Chinese madness happens here. medium nocaption85690047All parents will feel pressured to get their children ‘extra’ help. School is no longer enough. Schoolteachers aren’t sufficient. Expert tutors connected through an app will become a requirement rather than a choice. We already have the Kota factory phenomenon. Move Kota to your phone screen, and soon you will have a national tuition pandemic. Maybe we already do.Children will finish school and spend several hours on tuitions to keep up their marks. Gone are the evenings spent playing in the parks or relaxing on weekends. Sports, musical instruments, dramatics, art, elocutions, debates – anything that doesn’t feature in entrance tests or board exams will be cut out. Indian parents are ashirwad-giving mercenaries. They will push their children, make them surrender their childhoods to get those two extra marks. The same two marks that often decide where you will end up in life. We already have 100% cutoffs in some colleges. What’s the difference in the abilities of a student who gets a 98% vs the one who gets 100%? The argument that competition is good doesn’t hold here. Students are slaving over an unproductive task: Just get a few extra marks. The time spent to score 99 instead of 97 in physics could have been used to learn a completely new skill, which would make one more employable and contribute more to the economy. However, in the Great Indian Mad Education Race, there’s no time to think about these things. And now with billions of dollars in capital and tech backing it, yes, we are looking at a tuition pandemic.Apart from driving children insane, private tuitions harm in other ways. They take away the level playing field. Many of these tuitions cost lakhs. How many Indians can afford that? And if those who take tuitions get an edge to get in while others don’t, what is our education system testing? How rich your parents are? The solution does not lie in banning mega educational companies. That’s absurd. Also, that attacks supply of tuitions, but does nothing about the huge demand for it. And if there’s demand, Indian parents will find a way to circumvent the law and give their child the edge.Here are some solutions. One, we need to make a cultural shift. We must let our children breathe. There are professions other than engineering and medicine, really. If you are excellent at anything, you will get somewhere in life. We also need more good colleges. Why haven’t we been able to open more universities with the same reputation as Delhi University? Why are new edtech startups worth billions coming up, while there are almost no new reputable universities? The issue is regulations, which are messed up when it comes to opening colleges. No reputable person wants to open one, and many shady guys have entered the field. Incentivise good people to open colleges, grant prime land and create more world-class institutions. Take the pressure off the cutoffs and entrance exams. Third, while a ban is incorrect, we will need to better regulate the mushrooming educational startups. Many of these companies provide excellent services, such as making people job-ready, upgrading skill-sets or teaching different vocations. All that is fine. However, the fear is that Indian parents will eventually turn these edtech companies into tuition factories, for that is all many Indian parents would pay for. We need to regulate the sector to ensure that doesn’t happen. China’s massive crackdown is about how the tuition-obsession combined with tech can go too far. We need to fix this here before it is too late.Illustration: Chad Crowe