Demand for abroad study rises
By Shyamola Khanna A local carpenter, Srinivas, mortgaged his share of pastoral land to send his son to ‘Amrika’. Ravi, a local daily wage earner who has migrated from his village in interior Telangana, has borrowed Rs 50,000 to pay the first installment of his children’s school fees at a convent school in Hyderabad. Yes, […]
By Shyamola Khanna
A local carpenter, Srinivas, mortgaged his share of pastoral land to send his son to ‘Amrika’. Ravi, a local daily wage earner who has migrated from his village in interior Telangana, has borrowed Rs 50,000 to pay the first installment of his children’s school fees at a convent school in Hyderabad.
Yes, Indian parents want their children to get international education, regardless of which strata of society they come from. The number of Indian students opting for higher education abroad is predicted to grow to 1.8 million by 2024.
Education as a business
The rising demand for higher education has spawned a lot of spurious colleges in India, where degrees are being churned out with impunity. Education as a business is making a place for itself, although quality and employability is largely becoming questionable.
Larger choice of subjects
In this scenario, diaspora children are opting to study a diverse set of subjects – music, arts, film making, public policy, international relations, etc. More often than not, Indian parents push the kids into careers that they feel are right for the ‘little’ ones. The career counsellors in the US universities have helped the kids break the mould.
Sometimes the heart will find its own, in spite of having trained for something else. Isheeta Ganguly’s example is a case in point.
India-born New York-based Isheeta Ganguly has been in the news for being the first Indian diaspora child to have a full-length musical play being performed off Broadway (December 22, 2021) – Shakuntala Awaits, based on the Indian mythological tale of King Dushyant and Shakuntala. Surprisingly, Isheeta did a master’s in public health at Columbia University, though her first love remains theatre and music.
Vicram Chatterjee (22), from Chicago, chose to be a film producer/director, and is currently working with a YouTuber. “A collaborative environment throughout college, fostered a mindset to achieve the best version of myself. I took this experience and now lead a large production team with those principles in mind,” says Vicram.
His younger brother Rayan (18) was born with a hearing disability, and he has joined Savannah College of Animation and Design (Georgia) to pursue a creative calling. His cochlear implant and the MOOG curriculum, which works for hearing impaired children with cochlear implants, has aided him immensely. Today, he speaks confidently and with clarity.
His mother Pia avers, “If he was going to high school in India, he would have been able to mainstream, but initially in India when language, listening comprehension and speaking are being taught, he could not have fitted in.”
There is Adit Bhattacharya (14), from Dallas, Texas who has been learning the trombone. Currently, in grade eight, he is part of a band whose first public performance was at the city town hall. His mother Monica admits that initially, his trombone was, “a lot of loud noise, but now his efforts are appreciated”.
Akshay Chitturi (28),a biomedical engineer from Johns Hopkins University did his master’s in bioinformatics, and is on his second master’s degree in computer science from Pennsylvania University. For his undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins, he says, “This was my first exposure to the world of bioinformatics. After graduation, I earned my master’s in bioinformatics and got the specialist’s slot at the hospital.”
His younger brother Abhinav has studied international relations and is now doing a master’s in management in the US.
Tanya Naidu Seth schooled in Lagos, Nigeria, and finished her school certificate at Johannesburg, SA. She went on to study hospitality in Switzerland. For her “Jo’burg and Switzerland, with their exposure to a larger world were exciting and different”.
Bottom line
Education abroad is today a precursor to a successful career. Take an exotic subject and team it with a degree from an established university and you have a perfect prescription for a well-paid job, in India or in the US.
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