American universities have now become "safety schools" for increasingly stressed and traumatized Indian students and parents, who complain that one fateful event - the final high school examination -, can make or break a teenager's future career.
Delhi University issued cutoff scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 percent in some cases. The Indian Institutes of Technology, which are spread across the country, have an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent — and that is only from a pool of roughly 500,000 who qualify to take the entrance exam, a feat that requires two years of specialized coaching after school.
The problem is that there are not enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.
Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic years, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 percent in the past year, according to the American Embassy here.
Although a majority of Indian students in the US are graduate students, undergraduate enrolment has grown by more than 20% in the past few years. And while wealthy families have been sending their children to the best American schools for years, the idea is beginning to spread to middle-class families, for whom Delhi University has historically been the best option.
