Education becoming a business!
This trend is not a happy development. There are very many diverse sides to education, culture, and our own destinies.Do you know the size of the Indian education market size?Every day you almost see the front pages of the mainstream newspapers, both the print and the online media ads, and other catchy lines about the education and other jobs-linked ads offering various arts and professional courses whose quality or genuineness are never tested! So, attractive. All the big corporates seem to be engaged in these educational activities.
No one cares to test the genuineness of these education courses and other such needs to know what they are worth.And do you know the Indian peculiarities of Indian education?India has a very long association or dependence on British rule and British education impact on the Indian education sector.
For instance, the UK prides itself on its 40 billion pounds higher education sector, ranging from very reputed names like Oxford and Cambridge to others whose new names are countless, and London and other British cities have now unlimited new names. And there are also very many new strategies to recruit students from overseas and among which India comes almost at the top.
In the year 2020 alone something like 2 lakhs eleven thousand students had applied to admission to the UK universities and the USA to something like19,103 students and why even from Hong Kong 33,274 and from Malaysia 40,000 students and even from Nepal 21 thousand students applied to UK institutions. The revenue from the overseas students comes to 2 billion pounds and another 2 billion from other countries.
The point is that today education is a billion dollars worth of market and education is no more any great idea or philosophy or other great speculations. Now, coronavirus attack had changed the entire space with so many uncertainties.The annual international students fund, something like another 6 billion pounds is at risk, with the throttling of air travel and other disruptions expected both the short and medium-term time scales.
I invite the Indian education experts’ here – both the education entrepreneurs and the charity-minded ones who too have to turn to the market opportunities.The whole world is now tuned to the opening up and the radical social and economic changes in the education sector.
The so-called term-STEM, sciences, technology, engineering, and mathematics- is very much in the imagination of education providers and even in the USA where lakhs of students seek admission to its universities are now faced with the education loan burden.
Reports come to say that student’s education loan burden has gone up and many student loans go to build new apartments rather than to pursue higher education. Student unemployment is a big issue worldwide and on a recent visit to Greece, we found that many adult students in Greece choose to live with their parents for the simple reason of unemployment among the university finished students.
So, education is no more just an idea it is also about jobs and unemployment. Even in India, the educated unemployment is catching up fast and the educational landscape is changing unemployment for educated young men and women in India too.
The States are silently neglecting new education plans and the so-called New Education Policy (NEP) is yet to take off in India.