I remember a passage from a book, or perhaps a magazine I read long ago, about a U.S. college student talking about his fellow French interns. The gist of his account was that all of the French interns he encountered seemed to know each other from before, or knew someone in common in the colleges they studied back in France. The U.S. student found this unusual for he felt U.S. college students rarely had such an intensity of common connections. A key reason they knew each other, he thought, was because unlike the U.S. students, the French largely went to a narrow set of elite colleges (The Grande Ecoles)1.
There is a clear parallel between the French and Indian elite students in this regard. And when I say elite Indian students, this extends beyond IITs / BITS / NITs to other selective engineering colleges such as Manipal, VIT, PESIT, or even the National Law Schools, Ashoka, city colleges such as SRCC, St Xaviers etc. Bring together two Indians who went to any such selective college, and invariably they will find a common connect.
It helps that these elite Indian students are mostly from a narrow sliver of the Indian student body. If we estimate that there are about 175-200k2 or students entering these elite Indian colleges annually then remember that almost all of these elite students come from a base of ~3.5m students graduating out of English mediums schools annually in India, or an even smaller sliver of the 1-1.5m graduating from the English medium national board schools (CBSE / ICSE)3. I would hazard that about 3-4,000 schools spread across the top 30-40 cities in India will account for as much as 75-80% of these 175-200k students. This explains why elite Indian students find common connections far easily. In that regard, this tweet is telling.
https://twitter.com/shuvi/status/1286687677807357952
Unlike the French with their Grande Ecoles or U.S. with its Ivy League moniker, there is no equivalent convenient moniker in India for top tier or elite colleges. You often see IIT/IIM as a catchphrase for such colleges. Sometimes this is expanded to IIT/IIM/BITS or IIT/NITs/IIM as the case may be. I find the IIT/IIM catchphrase odd because IIM is a post-grad college exclusively (barring IIM Indore which has an unusual 5yr BBA+MBA program). In addition, it is an inconvenient moniker one as it uses a specific set of institutions as a catchall phrase for elite colleges. You are never sure when it refers to those institutions only, or when it refers as a moniker. Given this, we need a term that better describes or serves as a catchphrase for top tier colleges in India. I will put forth my proposal soon in this essay, but to get there I want to begin with the following components or characteristics of the elite Indian college, and use that to explore Indian society.
MERIT Schools
I see top tier colleges in India (or even abroad) as having the following distinct characteristics. They are –
Tough to get in to or have a high selectivity in intake: Less than 10-20% (in many cases <1%) of students who apply get in to these colleges
Either based in a Metro and / or is Residential in nature: Elite colleges are usually residential in nature, the exceptions being SRCC / St Xavier’s and their ilk located inside a Metro. These have a mix of day scholars and boarders. There isn’t a single elite college in a city that is attended only by day scholars. And similarly outside of the top 7 metros, there isn’t a single reasonably well-known city-based college, with a large day-scholar population.
National / All-India intake: the student body is from across all states in India. There may be a skew towards certain regions (specifically metros) but on the whole there isn’t a single region that is not represented (The North-East typically gets the least representation).
English-fluent students: Graduates of these institutions are fluent in English. Not all of them speak perfectly but almost all of them, if not all of them, do written English well, and are conversant with aspects of Western culture.
You can look at any college that is considered top tier or elite in India, from the IITs to Xaviers in Mumbai or Ashoka University, and you will see that they tick these four boxes – of selectivity in intake, students from all across India (national intake), presence in a metro or residential nature, and English-fluency.
Some of these features correlate together – colleges that are tough to get in to and are highly selective see a national intake; these are highly desired institutions and seen applications from across India. So does residential with an all-India intake, as students coming all across from India need a safe place to stay. It is hard to think of an elite institution in India that does not tick these boxes. And I will say even the converse – that if you do not tick these boxes, you will not be seen as an elite institution in India.
The best I could come up with, using the first letters of Tough to get in to, Metro / Residential, India-wide intake and English-fluent, was MERIT schools or colleges as a moniker for these colleges. This is of course a pun on the word ‘merit’ which in India, has come to take on a very different meaning from its origins. MERIT colleges thus comprise not only IITs and BITS but even VIT, Manipal, PESIT, Ashoka, Shiv Nadar U, the National Law Schools, and even colleges such as NID, Srishti, St Stephen’s, Xaviers etc., any college that is selective, sees national intake of students and is residential in nature (or has facilities for boarders) and sees people like us, or the kids of PLUs, graduate.
IIT and VIT
It is admittedly, surprising for many to see a VIT (Vellore Institute of Technology) and Srishti in the same league as an IITB or SRCC. And some of you may accuse me of stretching the borders of the top-tier category a bit too much. I would disagree. My arguments are of course based on my lived experience i.e., from my interactions with graduates of these colleges with whom I have interacted in my corporate and personal life. And I haven’t seen any markedly distinguishing qualities in these students. You are entitled in your criticism to say that I have only interacted with a narrow set of students from VIT or PESIT, and specifically those who have selected themselves into the circles I move in. Essentially that these students are the winners and I shouldn’t judge the entire college basis a set of winners.
That is fair, and in my defence and those of the students from VIT, PESIT etc., all I would say is that the decisive advantage given by an exceptional performance on the IIT JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) has started declining today. In the 60s-90s when information asymmetry was rife, when the internet didn’t exist, IITs/BITS conferred a decisive advantage – of access to resources and opportunities. Today you can build your profile by creating, building, writing, interning and this can be done independent of the institution. Heck, you don’t even need to go to college today to do all of the above and build your personal brand. Thus what the internet has done is to disturb the career path dependencies that arose or occurred due to performance on one exam, like the JEE.
Still, then why do colleges matter, and why does a VIT score over a tier 2 engineering school in Madurai or Meerut? Why not then extend the MERIT tag to every college in the country? Well, I do think a certain minimum number of high IQ competitive students matter in the student base. I don’t know what this number is – if it is 70% or 50% or 40%? But a certain number it is needed to ensure recruiter interest, and for each student to feel the pressure to compete. And an institution like VIT is able to attract this minimum number. Also don’t forget that colleges such as VIT are selecting from a relative affluent portion of the Indian population, those who can afford to send their kids of English-medium national board schools such as CBSE / ICSE which contribute a significant number of students to these MERIT schools. Parents and relatives of students in these institutions can pull levers to ensure the right internships and interview opportunities, thus ensuring some level-playing field vis-à-vis the IITs.
It is these factors that push a VIT or PESIT or Ashoka in to the MERIT Colleges category. And even as these have entered the MERIT category, the decisive advantage that the IITs and top-tier engineering colleges enjoyed vis a vis their less prestigious peers has been declining. It is not surprising that the number of students taking the JEE has steadily dropped from 1.35m in ’14 to 0.93m in ’20; that is a 30% drop.
Over the next few sections of this essay, I will double-click on the characteristics of MERIT schools, one by one, to better understand them, and what they mean in the context of India today.
The ‘I’ in MERIT
The most interesting of these characteristics is the national or all-India intake. In fact it is interesting to see top MERIT or top-tier colleges in India as one element of a ‘national’ educational and career track that exists in India. The first are the schools. CBSE boards (20m enrolled across K12) and ICSE boards (1.8m enrolled) are less than a tenth of the 250-260m students enrolled in our K12 institutions. But these two national boards account for a large proportion of the feed into top tier colleges – here is a story on how CBSE boards account for the majority of IIT entrants.
Statistics like this – you will see that the percentage going into Liberal Arts colleges such as Ashoka or Krea from national board schools like CBSE / ICSE schools will be even higher – isn’t accidental. There is a strong correlation between access to national platforms and income in India. We have a strong central government that has been getting stronger every year at the cost of the regional / state governments (this trend has been on in the last 70 years). Much of economic and regulatory policy is now determined centrally. It is tough to build a large business in India without expanding nationally (except in a few areas like liquor, real estate and agricultural trading) as the size of the Indian market is small. So if you need to expand nationally, then you need to be able to compete nationally, which means you need to hire people with skillsets that can fit into this environment, which means graduates from these national institutions and so on.
To succeed in India is thus to break free of your regional, vernacular chains, and become part of the urban, national and English world. For, this is where the highest economic rewards are, and also where the highest economic and social degrees of freedom exist. This is unlike the U.S or even Europe (except perhaps France) where you can be a hugely successful regional star with zero national shadow. In these countries, a regional identity or status isn’t markedly inferior to the national one. Not so in India.
What the above has done is to create two parallel tracks of education in India, starting from kindergarten through K12 and college – one national and the other regional. In the national, and elite track, you go to an urban, English medium national or international board school, then to a selective-national-residential college and eventually you join a corporate that has a national or international presence. You interact with your peers in a mix of English and Hindi, and you consume a lot of international and cool local culture (Paatal Lok and Prateek Kuhad). This ‘national track’ India is about 10% of India and gets a large share of the economic spoils, in contrast to the parallel regional / local track that is much larger but has a lower share of the economic spoils.
‘National Track’ India
Why does national status or identity matter in India? Well, one factor clearly is that the national identity helps you get into professions that pay better, as we saw earlier. The second is a bit more complicated, and has to do with how a sense of national consciousness (or identity) and elite stature has conflated in India. I am going to have to elaborate this a bit.
A country exists to enable the maximal economic and personal degrees of freedom for its educated elite. If a section of the educated elite cannot operate freely or maximize their wages, then they will chose to transform it (politically or via other quasi-political means) or partition it or migrate to another ‘country’, e.g., fear of getting swamped by the Hindu majority in independent India led to the Punjabi elite canvassing for and carving out Pakistan. The educated elite is the determining factor because it is they who have the ability to organize and canvass for change. And, it is also equally correct to say that the country’s size is determined by the extent to and ease with which the elite can operate in and maximize their economic wages. The EU’s expansion was a desire by the elite of Western and Central Europe to expand the market and playing field for the elites4.
Up until the British conquered India, there were broadly two communities who were somewhat economically mobile. These were the Brahmins and the Banias. Now there is no concept of a national caste in India – all caste identities are broadly regional. But thanks to their relatively greater economic mobility, in these two communities a kind of national consciousness emerged. Prestige and national consciousness, effectively melded together in them. Meanwhile the rest of Indians had a largely regional consciousness, for they saw themselves deriving from their identities largely from their home regions. I remember an evocative portrait of a poor villager Kaccheru in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, a fictional portrait of 1950s India; all I remember from that portrait is that Kaccheru had not travelled to even the nearest small town near his village. People were largely immobile until recently.
With the arrival of the British came a definitive notion of ‘India’ as a geographic and political unit. From a diverse culture with common Indic elements, we became a nation state. As the Indian state evolved under the British, education, especially English language education, became one of the routes to economic advancement. A tiny Indian interpreter class ‘Indian in blood, but English in taste’ emerged to corner the economic spoils on offer. And with the creation of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and the coming together of the elites to organize against the British further, for the first time, a stronger sense of national consciousness and identity emerged, albeit amongst a tiny elite educated set of Indians. From just Brahmins and Banias we started seeing elite members of other castes and communities (incl Parsis, Sikhs and Muslims) get imbued with a national consciousness and identity. These events solidified the link between national consciousness and elite stature in India. You couldn’t be one without the other.
Since then, and with every passing decade, we are seeing an expansion in the number of Indians with a national consciousness. Today, I would think there are about ~200m Indians who have national economic mobility, about 3/4ths of them being English speakers, the rest are blue-collar economic migrants. These 150m or so Indians are what I refer to as national track Indians / India1 – people like us who fly, use credit cards and drive cars. Every year or so, a few odd million get added to the group.