

Indian Students Compete for Plum Colleges - tokenadult
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/world/asia/24test.html

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pgbovine
just to preempt responses of the form "higher education is a rip-off, it's way
better to just learn stuff on your own and start your own software start-up",
keep in mind that we in developed countries (I can only speak for the U.S.,
but it might be true elsewhere too) have the privilege of living in a
relatively wealthy and stable society where one _can_ flourish without much
formal education, with the right entrepreneurial determination (coupled with
great luck, of course).

in the U.S., the income and lifestyle disparity between someone who went to a
top-ranked college and someone without formal education might not be
noticeable (controlling for cost-of-living), but just from anecdotal evidence,
i've heard that in developing countries, there can be orders of magnitude
differences ... life in the underclass can be pretty darn crappy. keeping this
in mind might help people understand a bit better why youths and adults in
these countries obsess so much over their test scores and admissions into
universities.

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prog
Thats a very insightful comment, especially for someone who doesn't stay in
India :-)

Just to give an example, as to why its important to get really good scores in
school and college. I and my (now) wife graduated from a reasonably well known
college of engineering as classmates. I had decent marks so I got a job during
campus placement. It was a good pay for a fresh grad from industry wide
perspective. My wife didn't have the greatest scores (but the scores weren't
too bad either). She didn't get a job for ~8 months. After that she did get a
job in a tiny company (~5-10 people) that took her in as a trainee for zero
pay. 3-4 months after working there, she could use that experience to get a
job that paid her about USD 60 (INR 3000) per month, which is quite low (I pay
my cook that much now a days for an hours work, this was about 10 years ago).
And then over time she worked in different companies and is now has a good job
with in a well know cellphone provided. As for me, I comfortably worked for
about 8 years in different companies, following which I dabbled in a startup
with an ex-colleague and now taking a breaking to work on a few hobby
projects.

The point being, that in India, getting good scores required to having a
comfortable life. There may be exceptions, but if you don't get a good score
you will pretty much be struggling for the first few years irrespective of how
good you are.

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makmanalp
Exact same situation in Turkey. There are a lot of students but not enough
universities. You are expected to take a 3 hour and 15 minute exam of diverse
topics to determine a score which will determine whether you can apply to a
certain department of a certain university. Then, you may get in depending on
how many other people also applied to that department and how they scored
compared to you. The end result is people saying "Oh, I couldn't make computer
science, I guess I'll be a marine biologist." I think pretty much everyone
unanimously agrees that it's dumb. It used to work 30 years ago when the
number of university applicants was not even an eighth of the current number
and the exam was reasonable. When more people started applying, the amount of
universities didn't scale up and so they had to filter out more people, and
the exam got progressively harder to the point of having trick questions to
throw students off.

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BoppreH
It happens on Brazil as well. It's common for people to take six-months
courses to review all high-school contents before taking the entrance exam,
and it's also common for them to fail at least once.

Depending on the college and graduation you want, you might be competing with
other 15, 20 people for that spot.

But that happens mostly on the public colleges, that not only are free, but
considered much better than the private ones. And then we get a cross: rich
people can pay for the courses and go to the (free and better) public
colleges, while poor people must join a (paid and worse) private college.

It's quite messed up.

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sdave
(w.r.t engineering..) Unlike in US , where you have _many_ universities of
repute & cutting edge research - in India we have only the IITs or at the next
level perhaps the NITs(with quite a level of difference).And with millions of
kids longing for that coveted seat in the iit , we have cut throat
competition.Coaching for entrance exams has been a thriving industry in India.

