India’s Excellence

India is a huge country (with just under 1.2 billion people), and its impact globally in the fields of science, medicine, technology and finance is profound. My belief is that if you took the Indian Diaspora out of the United States, it would be a matter of days before our information super-highways collapsed, scientific and medical research slowed to a trickle and our banks and financial institutions simply stopped working. How does a country where only 12.4% of its 186,000 students (a pretty bad ratio) produce such incredible academic results? Chalk it up to volume and competition.

You see, in a country where there are relatively few college spots and a vast horde of applicants, the selection process has become one of the most brutalizing on earth – all based on series of standardized tests that has college-bound teenagers living in a hyper-pressurized world of seriously competitive academics. Life for pre-college kids is stressful enough to result in suicides when test scores disappoint. Parents and students alike experience medical issues with surges in blood pressure and even blood sugar issues (diabetes). Children have to take these tests to get out of high school, but the same tests are used to weed out those who get to go on to higher education… and those who don’t.

The issue of who gets in is a barometer of social standing as well. The March 24^th New York Times: “For parents, the anxiety derives from fears that a bad score could derail their child’s future, but also from a social competitiveness for a child to score above the coveted 90-percent level. ‘The score of the child has become a status symbol,’ [one middle-class mother] said. ‘If we go to a party these days, everybody asks me, ‘How is your child doing?’ No one asks about my health. The question is, ‘What is your child’s academic status?’ ’” College prep courses, practice tests and constant studying are the lot of those who want to go on. And more tests.< /o:p>

While this selection process puts the best and the brightest into college, almost half of India’s colleges and universities are substandard with pressure building for more schools for increasing numbers of students. But then, there are those academic institutions that shine as world-class institutions that sit atop the “best” list on a global basis – the fifteen Indian Institutes of Technology (the first was founded in 1951), comparable to our MIT or Cal Tech but even more selective. According to the Times, in 2008, 320,000 students took the specialized additional test (for those focusing on science and technology) for the 8,000 openings at these schools. The worse students at these campuses have math skills that are staggering. These elite students are sought after by the best grad schools and the highest paying companies on earth. A disproportionate number go on to become the mega-billionaires who have generated wealth in technology and financial expertise.

What this all means for the United States is that this is the playing field in which American students will compete in the future. As we cut our school budgets and push higher education out of reach for more students, increase class size and decrease the quality of our educational experience, remember exactly who our competition is and will be for the foreseeable future. And that’s just India.

I’m Peter Dekom, and looking over my shoulder is beginning to hurt my neck.