Like many others, my family suffered from partition—on the eastern side. My father and his family migrated from East Pakistan (Bangladesh) to what was then undivided Assam. At the time, my father was 23 years old, having completed his BA from the University of Dhaka. I am told he always wanted to do a master’s, but couldn’t because the dislocation meant he couldn’t get a migration certificate that was essential to study in some other university. Consequently, he placed a premium on education.
Since he couldn’t apply this to his own life, he extended the aspiration to his son’s. He enrolled me in a “Western missionary” school. I now realise that, given his financial situation, this is something he could ill afford. Then, somewhere around the age of nine, scholarships took over and financed the rest of my education. I wonder what would have happened had those scholarships not been there. How would my father have managed my education?
I don’t think my parents were exceptional. In the 1950s and 60s, many families saved and scrimped for the sake of children’s education. At the time, it was more boys than girls. Pre- and post-independence, there was always a relatively elite section that managed to get their offspring educated. That was different. Here, I am flagging a generation that may broadly be called the lower middle class. In search of a better life for their children, they went beyond their means and succeeded.
Notice that education doesn’t only mean what you learn from your school and peers. It also means the ability to break into networks that would otherwise have been beyond one’s reach—networks that enable a person to develop contacts and careers. There are countless anecdotes, perhaps not pervasive, of such breaking away from the class one had been born into, stories of aspirational successes because of parental sacrifices. If we think of a radius, the radius has become wider with the aspirational goal extending more and more to the periphery.
School education is an end in itself. Because of multiplier benefits and positive externalities, it is not merely a means to an end. Therefore, if the gross enrolment ratio (GER) has touched 100 percent across states, that is something to be applauded.
Retention and quality are a different matter. I am more ambivalent about GER in higher education. It is now more than 28 percent in India; Korea’s has increased from 10 percent in the 1970s to 100 percent now. I am ambivalent because higher education cannot be an end in itself and there is an indisputable lack of correlation in India between higher education and skills the market values. In other words, access to higher education doesn’t necessarily ensure aspirational goals. More importantly, who is financing that education?
Without sounding patronising, I want to say that I don’t think higher education is for everyone. It is for those who possess merit. For others, there should be exit options, lacking today, earlier. For those who possess merit, I think most institutions, even private ones, have systems of financial aid and scholarship through cross-subsidisation. For those who possess the merit, access shouldn’t be a problem. There are of course professional courses with sky-rocketing expenses. Imagine the kind of commensurate returns they are expected to bring in the future.
When we were students, there weren’t student loans, not on the scale they exist today. A lot of higher education is paid for by debt, typically taken by a parent and not the child. It isn’t unusual for a family to sell a home to finance education. While this may not be pervasive across all layers of society, in some it is concentrated on those professional courses and often targeted abroad.
The Indian vice president recently spoke of going abroad as a new disease. It isn’t new at all. It has been going on for years; except that, earlier, it was restricted to a layer of society. That has become more widespread and one can’t grudge that spread. Every disease has a symptom and a cause. I think we continuously duck the problem of the elephant in the room: reservations. Because of reservations, the general category student, even if meritorious, has few options. Send the offspring abroad—the US, Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand.
Other than education, there is the prospect of jobs and permanent migration, though it’s a bit muted now. The RBI recently told us the educational loans outstanding with banks is Rs 1,23,066 crore and the number of Indian students studying abroad 13 million.
Because of the nature of my job, whenever I travel to a state, the state government is in charge of protocol. The driver in Kolkata has been Zeeshan. His salary is Rs 50,000 a month, lower than a driver’s in the Union government. Rs 10,000 goes to finance a one-room illegal encroachment threatened with demolition every day.
There are two sons. The eldest has decided further education is not for him and has taken up a job as an electrician’s assistant. The younger suffers from that aspiration bug, and has persuaded his father to send him for a computer course in one of Delhi’s universities. A proper degree, though not from a good institute. That son has not succeeded in getting a job and it has been a year. He is constantly looking for a job, or so he says. In all probability, the salary he is offered is not commensurate with his expectations, given that he is now a graduate.
Meanwhile, for more than a year, his father has paid Rs 15,000 a month to finance his lodging in Delhi. The son has now convinced the father that the only recourse is for Zeeshan to send his son abroad for further education, with an estimated cost of Rs 1 crore. At present, given Zeeshan’s financial state, no bank is willing to extend that kind of loan to him. I tried to persuade Zeeshan against the idea, but he didn’t seem convinced. He is trying to get that loan—if not from a bank, from the market.
A terrible idea? There are many, I think, like this father, sacrificing for the welfare of the family and the future generation. Do you think this is a terribly good idea? What benefit does this bring? Reason for my ambivalence.
(Views are personal)
(bibek.debroy@gov.in)
Bibek Debroy | Economist, scholar and author of more than 30 books, most recently a translation of The Bhagavad Gita