Preparing students for future and failure

The aim of education has always been to equip students with the knowledge, skills and dispositions that would enable them to contribute to the social, economic, and political transformation of the country. However, a contrasting perceived aim is to see education as a medium to enter the next stage of education and career. This leads to a clear lack of clarity about the ultimate aim of education. This is evident in the manner students prepare for entrance examinations.

IIT-JEE is one such entrance examination. JEE has been adopted by almost all engineering institutes and universities as a common entrance examination for their programmes. Students take intensive coaching which involves high tuition fees and stretches the financial resources of many parents.

On the one hand, most aspirants don’t make it to any of the aspirational engineering seats. While top engineering seats are hotbeds of hyper-competition, most others have hardly any takers.

The important question is: where do all those students who don’t succeed in JEE go? They typically settle for other less coveted engineering colleges, science or non-science degree programmes in decreasing order of preference and increasing order of disappointment and disgruntlement.

At a microscopic level, lakhs of young souls lose several years of childhood and early adulthood, craving and competing for career paths of dubious values. This hyper-competition creates a public perception of a value for these engineering programmes that is, in fact, inflated.

Students who pass out finally scramble for a very limited number of high-paying or prestigious jobs. Most companies that absorb the graduates have a common complaint that the freshers are unemployable.

A 360-degree analysis of this condition is definitely warranted. Let’s accept that the herd mindset is common among all humans. While resisting its influence on us is desirable and effective to some extent, trying to completely free ourselves of this instinct may be a lost battle. Instead, the key may lie in finding our own herd.

Most middle-class families are exposed to very limited career options as taken by slightly older batches of students. For example, all students in our immediate neighbourhood and extended families who are about to complete their schooling have already plonked themselves on the conveyor belts of techno-school-style institutes. Such echo chambers severely limit the vision of aspirants and their parents.

This forces them to opt for choices about which at least some information is available, however incomplete and biased, rather than taking a plunge in a direction about which they have no information at all.

Avoiding echochambers

One option is to find and connect with online communities which are exploring diverse career options. The Internet may prove a very effective platform for breaking free from the limitations of connecting only with one’s physical neighbours.

Career counsellors are professionals who can help us take a broader view of the career choices suitable for our competencies and interest.

Some schools today seem to unjustifiably force or bias their students toward a restricted view of career directions. Instead, they should take the onus of preparing them for a broader set of career paths based on their individual capabilities and choices.

Finally, parents play a very important role in counselling and supporting their children. There may be careers with more or fewer opportunities, whether real or perceived. In any case, such figures are statistical, and may not apply to individuals. Children today may feel pressured to pick from a limited set of options seeing most of their peers going that way.

Let us give children an environment where they are exposed to a wide variety of educational choices, instead of contributing to their anxiety. Let them enjoy a certain level of autonomy and agency in making their career choices. This would make it more likely that their next career decision is taken on the basis of their competency and interest rather than what’s considered coveted under peer pressure.

(The authors are professors at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bengaluru and Azim Premji University, Bengaluru respectively)