Education in India – coaching classes, suicides and foreign degrees

It is a quirk of fate that all Indian parents want their children to acquire such an education that they stand out among the masses and pursue professions in the engineering or medical fields – this has resulted in the concept of coaching classes, a necessary evil.
It may sound weird but to the Indian parent, education means either engineering or medicine – these are the first priorities. No one is interested in general education or alternate job-oriented courses. Their hidden desire is to see that their children achieve what they themselves had been denied. The denial could have been due to financial problems in the family or the low IQ of the parents themselves.
In India, in order to get admitted to the prestigious streams of engineering or medicine, the student has to crack the JEE – Joint Entrance Examination. The rank he obtains in this exams would determine which stream he can get admitted to. And – it is here after announcement of results that heartbreaks occur because of not getting enough marks to opt for a branch of choice.
And – coaching classes take responsibility of grooming the students in the proper way so that they can crack the JEE with ease and come out with flying colors.
Of course, such a situation has given rise to this group of exploiters whose tentacles reach out to far corners of the country – they arrange special classes and students make a queue to join up when they are in the fag end of their schooling.
The operators of the coaching classes spend heavily on ads in the media and seize the opportunity to mint their millions by setting up coaching classes.
The concept was mooted sometimes in the 1970s and, students began to make a beeline for these classes because their classmates did. And – unless they also join the crowd, they would be left out, ridiculed and made to feel inferior – they would get isolated.
It was not a state of things that any society would want but it had to accept the changing mindset that led to psychological problems and the tendency of students to commit suicide – the reason was their inability to rise to the expectations of their parents. It kept preying on their minds and unable to succumb to the pressure, they took the easy way out.
Another trend that is gradually growing is of parents who send their children to study abroad – whatever the stream of knowledge, a foreign degree is always more sought after as compared an India degree. Of course, this option is meant only for those who can afford the high costs involved.