Indians and the Study Abroad Pandemic

The Annual African Migration of Wildebeest

Wildebeest, are members of the antelope family that inhabit the Serengeti plains of south-eastern Africa. For most of their lives, wildebeest graze in the grassy savannah and open woodlands of the plains, which straddle the nations of Tanzania and Kenya. Among Africa's many savanna regions, the Serengeti is the most well-known. More than 1.5 million wildebeest migrate in an enormous loop every year. The annual migration northwest, at the end of the rainy season happens usually in May or June. The search for greener pastures does not come without danger. Its migration route crosses many rivers, filled with giant Nile crocodiles, hungry lions, leopards and hyenas!

A similar migration of 1,50,000+ Indian students takes place in the months of August + September each year. With students bound for the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, Germany and even Ukraine! Much like the wildebeest these students cross the Atlantic & Mediterranean Seas in search of greener pastures! Competition and stampedes to get there is quite similar to the efforts of the wildebeest as witnessed in the mad scramble of SAT, GRE, TOEFL, IELTS, SOPs, Recommendation Letters. And finally the stampede at India’s Airports and in the aisles of airplanes as seen every year in Aug + Sept!

What does industry need? – Innovation, Capital and Labour

Mankind’s most basic instinct beyond survival is to be useful to the world and earn a living! This yearning has set aside Homo Sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom. Earning a living typically means working for a business, company or organisation that creates a set of products or services that customers are willing to pay for. Or be the creator of these products or services by being entrepreneurs or investors. Innovation, Capital & Labour work together to create new products and services that obsolete older ones and keep the economy going with its peaks and troughs!

The World’s Best Universities

America and its universities created many new concepts that changed the world just like the thinkers, philosophers and universities of Ancient India created many of the innovations that were the harbingers of human scientific progress (0, Astronomy, Maths, Alchemy, Metallurgy, Textile Tools, etc.) There is no doubt that the World’s best universities, since the 18th century have been in the USA, UK, Germany and have created the world’s modern innovations and driven the wheels of the world’s economy. MIT, Yale, Stanford, Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge being some of the institutions of eminence. 

In the last few decades, whilst basic research continues in these universities, innovations have mostly been delivered by the ecosystem of innovators, venture capitalists, SMEs, MSMEs, Israeli Kibbutz and startup hubs of Israel, California and Bengaluru!

What do Corporates need?

The job givers are typically corporates who have a set of products and services on offer and need innovation and labour to maintain or scale their businesses in the jungles of domestic and world markets. These businesses need fresh recruits who have the technical, communication skills and the sincerity, accountability, aspirations, team work and sense of responsibility to accomplish their given tasks. Whilst, technical and communication skills are best honed in the best universities the other “skills” are learnt through living life in the universe!

Learning away from Comfort Zones of Home

The best learning happens with exposure to challenges, guidance, mentors and tools that help create solutions. The first step of going away from Comfort Zones of Home helps youngsters access the opportunities to acquire this guidance and solution toolsets. And this does not happen when the same comfort zone of home is recreated through hyper parenting of indulgence, daily phone calls and messages and the supply of $s, #s and ₹s!! 

Learning happens when parents let their children be!! When they allow them to take risks, decisions, trip and fall! When the children learn that the world is not as bad and cut-throat as is made out to be by their parents. When they experience the give and take with other students, hostel & dorm mates and professors. As they experience the “working world” through deep academic and industry internships they learn the team work, analysis and synthesis skills to take on the world!

And this does not happen if it’s done in your home city or in universities abroad, studying and staying with other Indian students and eating Indian food everyday on parents funded stretched allowances! 50% of a person’s capabilities are supposed to be determined by his/her genes, 40% through their experiences and learnings until the age of 20 and another 10% acquired over the rest of their lifetime! Choices that are well known to parents through their own life experiences!

Masters Degree – who needs to get one?

As the skills and jobs marketplace can be very competitive, job aspirants need to be smart in navigating this competition to be noticed by dream employers by standing out through demonstrated understanding & skills, a stand-out project, internship or papers they published! Being part of campus placement in a well-known college/university helps and the work done in approaching stalwarts in the industry by seeking internships or mentorship helps convert them to job offers! So does industry really look for a Masters Degree from an applicant? Masters Degrees are most required to:

• A student wanting to switch to a field/course that he/she did not study in the undergraduate course. A Masters’ degree helps course correct and build a network if the Masters’ Degree is of higher standing than the university that awarded the undergraduate degree. Doing a MBA is also a “stream switch” to get to more lucrative “managerial” opportunities.

• Get into a PhD, Research or Academic program. This definitely needs a Masters’ Degree for deeper knowledge and skills in a field and to follow rules, regulations and "templates" of entrenched people/hirers in these programs.

• Go to America, UK, Australia, etc. that systematically attract, lure and entice students to apply and secure admissions in these well-endowed Universities ($980 B across top 100 US Universities). Prime time advertising and travel planning like websites (like Unischolar) of these "university recruiters" layout the red carpet to entice aspirants!

The exclusivity of the Intellectual, Economic and Social ROI of this may now be fading and is something to think about for the “herd” that wants to get there for that American degree at a huge cost to the family and student!

The new Universities of India

As Indian parents grew up in the stagnant and ration economy when many resources including access to professional and higher education was limited, they still tend to think that it remains so. The number of IITs, AIIMS, IIMs and NIDs have gone from 4+ to 25+ each now. Other professional degree institutions have exploded from a few 100 to 10,000+. Many new universities like Ashoka, FLAME, Krea, Jindal, Bennet, Azim Premji, Shiv Nadar, MIT PDU have brought in new experiential learning and research based academic ethos and world class physical infrastructure. They invite and attract some of the best academic brains, mentors and teaching methods to these universities. The philanthropists who fund these institutions are themselves world class achievers who are passionate about providing the best education. Here is a list of Indian University Rankings and number of Unicorn Founders from some of them. 

The narrative needs to be wrested away from the elite who paid for and sent their kids to institutions abroad and who control the narrative and beat down these institutions in India as not being good enough! 

Opportunities in the World | Led by India

As the Indian economy grows through government initiatives, large corporate investments into new and existing industries and the 1000s of startups that have mushroomed in the fintech, edutech, agritech, transportation, defence, space, clean energy and other sectors of the economy, it is creating, arguably the best opportunities anywhere in the world for youngsters to be a part of this growth. And many of these are export led with full integration with the world’s best! Therefore, working in India, creating for and selling to the world, will give the global exposure the degree abroad is supposed to give!

The Home Advantage of Support & Opportunities

I often ask my friends who studied for their masters and have lived in the US for 20+ years, why none (or only a few) of them have founded startups or taken the risk to take up alternate career paths in the land of opportunities, venture capital and the mecca of entrepreneurship. Some of them talk about the costs of educating their kids in the top universities, their home mortgages, medical insurance and future Medicare costs – the fear of many of these for sure! And how most of us who didn’t go abroad at least have a home already paid for and no fear of the great uncertainties of life like in the US! Contrast this with a good % of people who stayed back (especially in the IT industry) have been able to take the risk to do so in India! 

The home advantage definitely helps in navigating many aspects of careers, entrepreneurship, bringing up children, house help with a “cushion” that helps overcome fears of lifestyle sustenance while taking risks! And starting the day with the convenience and pleasure of a water jet for your daily ablutions is surely better than the toilet paper industry that needs to be supported for these daily tasks!! 😊

Work & Earn Anywhere

With the proliferation of inexpensive Broadband Internet Connections, the Internet, Data & Applications on the Cloud, the culture of Work from Home/Remote work has now been accepted by the world. This has enabled youngsters to work from anywhere in the world and access global opportunities. A hybrid work culture enables work from India with occasional/regular visits abroad to deliver projects as a part of global teams. Many of these opportunities are centered around the Global South and India in any case, with its many opportunities and economic growth. Don’t need a foreign degree to access these or if you did have one, you would be deputed to work in India on an Indian salary! Don’t need to be part of the education debt mountain that’s being incurred by the Indian middle-class to access these opportunities! 

The “are you in the educating kids abroad camp or not” competition is putting pressure on many middle-class finances, wasting resources or incurring debt without much ROI!

Be a Learner forever

With technologies, work tools and work ethos changing rapidly, being a learner forever, will not only keep you going in the workplace and corporate career but is essential to the very survival of the employer organisation and your continued employment. "Learning to learn" is the new mantra and can be applied regularly with easy access to mentors, information, data, knowledge and online courses being just a Google Search away. And you don’t need top $$s to access many of these! 

All the best for your or your children's education and careers. Wish them tremendous success in this world of wonderful opportunities!

Disclaimer

This article is based on my observations and heuristic data collected over many years of being in the IT and startup world with abundant global exposure, extensive and repeated travel to many of the countries mentioned. Also based on the observations of careers of many of my school, college friends and ex-colleagues who went abroad vs those who stayed back in India. 

I did not go abroad to do a masters’ degree in the US myself, first as a nationalist! and not wanting to put any further financial burden on my parents. A good first job of learning, doing world class R&D work in India then convinced me that it was not required anyways! Over the years, observed people who did go and many others like me who did not, and who rapidly got unique opportunities in the Indian corporate and startup worlds. 

My elder daughter studied at FLAME University in Pune studying Public Policy & Environment Studies. She got exposure to many subjects as a part of the liberal arts ethos of the University and was taught by professors in India with PhDs from many of the top universities in the world. The infrastructure was great, class size small (some classes had 4-5 students) and she was guided to pursue publication of technical papers as a student. She pursued internships with Centre for Policy Research, Centre for Environment Education, Kalpavriksh, Nature Conservation Foundation. She was exposed to the deep study of the Indian Coastal Policy, migration of Olive Ridley Turtles, man-animal conflict of Himalayan Bears, field study of long tailed macaque habitats in Great Nicobar and many other interesting projects. This work helped her get a fully paid Weidenfeld-Hoffman Scholarship for a Masters Degree at Oxford, the #1 ranked University for her course.

My younger, daughter is studying Product Design at NID, Ahmedabad and opted to go for a semester abroad to Holon University, Israel. She could not travel there since the Hamas attack happened a day before her travel. She had chosen this university over many others in the US, UK, Germany, Italy since it was a serious and involved course with abundant learning as compared to the easy paced, "concepts only" courses (as per observations of her peer group and institute seniors) available in the other countries. A point to note before spending the $s, #s and ₹s and incurring those ever mounting student loans!!

Both are adults now and free to make their own decisions as long as we don’t pay for their choices beyond good school, under graduate & masters’ degree education in India!