The New Safety Schools

For those of us who have participated in the college application process – either as applicants or parents or both – we dearly (??) remember listing the schools we really, really want at the top, the secondary schools that would be nice enough and the “safety” schools where we were/are pretty sure of acceptance. For the highest achievers in America, those top schools often included the cherished Ivies, the Seven Sisters, Stanford, Georgetown, Duke, a handful of superstar state institutions (Berkeley, UVa, etc.)… or Cal Tech and MIT for the engineering spirits. With admissions rates hovering around 10-15%, these are indeed elite schools.

But what would you think of a set of 16 engineering colleges where the admissions rate is more like 2% or a governmental university where tuition is generally less than $500 a year, but where scoring in the 95^th percentile in national exams just isn’t good enough to get into a basic economics program. India is the country, and the academic pressures on the teenaged intellectual elite of this country are staggering. They study their butts off – hours that would make even the most committed American teenagers cringe – but intensive tutoring to prepare students for the national entrance exams suck up dozens of additional hours per week, particularly in the last two years of high school. Poor Korean kids, who are in the same boat, where they are lucky to have sufficient breaks from school and tutoring to get five, maybe six hours of sleep a night.

The Indian universities suggested above include 16 campus Indian Institutes of Technology, scattered about India, each with its own area of specialization (e.g., mechanical, civil, electrical, computer science, etc.). Every years 500,000 prequalified applicants take the admissions tests, but only 2% of that group gains entrance, and only the cream of that crop winds up in the computer science specialized school. The winning scores are often at or ever-slightly-below 100% on that most-difficult, intensely mathematical test. Delhi University is the great school where a 95^th percentile just isn’t good enough, and the qualifications of those who gain admission to such top schools would shame our top Ivies or Oxford/Cambridge in the UK.

Indeed, the performance level of such young Indian scholars is so superlative that our top schools send recruiters to countries like India, Japan and Korea for potential freshmen, students whose parents find a way to scrape together the money to pay intensely expensive U.S. tuition rates, often north of $40 thousand a year, without needs of scholarship support or student loans. It’s just good business in a recession to get paying students, but sometimes these foreign students are so incredibly gifted that the American schools offer scholarships as well.

When Indian kids don’t get into their top local choices, they often find these America alternatives sufficiently enticing: “American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.

“Representatives from many of the Ivy League institutions have begun making trips to India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices in India, partly aimed at attracting a wider base of students. The State Department held a United States-India higher education summit meeting [October 13^th] at Georgetown University to promote the partnership between the countries… 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 year, 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 United States are graduate students, undergraduate enrollment has grown by more than 20 percent in the past few years. And while wealthy Indian 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… 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.” New York Times, October 13^th. Safety schools like Dartmouth (pictured above), Brown, Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

Funny how education is such a priority to those rapidly emerging markets… and how for some reason we think it’s just fine to cut our overall educational budgets to meet our deficit challenge… even though we are going to compete with these brilliant Indian, Korean, Chinese, etc. minds for generations to come. I guess we believe that our undereducated and under-prepared children will figure it out… later. Gee, it sure is exciting to listen to candidates tell us how we are so close to winning that war in Afghanistan… what’s it been now… ten years? How many billions?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it sure pisses me off how our government knows how to throw money away a whole lot better than it knows how to invest in its own future.