Eclipsed by money

The result of the JEE Main examination, the first hurdle to be crossed to enter elite higher educational institutions, has just been announced. This year, 11.26 lakh students, up from 10.26 lakh last year, took the test, of which 2.49 lakh were declared eligible to appear in the JEE Advanced.

The announcement includes the cutoff scores for different categories of students. The general category (GC) students scoring 90.77 percentile or higher have been declared eligible to write JEE Advanced. In contrast, the non-creamy-layer OBC students with 73.61 percentile scores were declared eligible. In sharp contrast, the Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) students, with a percentile score of only 51.97 and 37.23, respectively, have been declared eligible to take JEE Advanced.

Such a wide variation in the cutoff scores across social groups would provide ammunition to a section of society, the anti-reservationists, to assert how unjust reservation-based affirmative action is for the much more meritorious general category candidates. They may have some merit in their arguments, but, on the other side, it must be realised that the Dalits, deprived, and marginalised sections of society would stand little chance to access quality technical higher education.

Take, for example, the case of Muslim minorities in the country, most of whom belong to the poorest of the poor in the country. Deprived of reservation in admission, their participation in higher education in general and in elite institutions in particular is abysmally low; in fact, it is lower than that of the Scheduled Castes.

It has been proven that merit is also a social construct. A number of social, cultural, and economic factors play vital roles in signalling merit. Barring a few exceptions countable on fingers, the poor, the downtrodden, and the deprived are unable to realise their full potential due to their socioeconomic and cultural conditions and circumstances.

While we need more precise data to present a deep and thorough explanation, the available evidence is sufficient to prove the point. The declaration of the results of highly selective competitive examinations for admission and even jobs is invariably followed by huge hoardings and expensive full-page advertisements in national dailies by coaching institutes claiming that they produced the toppers and most who made the cutoff.

The coaching industry is outside of any regulatory purview. They are also not bound by the conditions of being not-for-profit institutions, as applicable to mainstream educational institutions. They charge prices to train their students to crack the hard nuts that competitive examinations have come to be.

Where does this leave the economically and socio-economically disadvantaged children? They are heavy on the pocketbook and often beyond the means of common people. Even the middle class pays through the nose for coaching their children by sacrificing many necessities, including healthcare. So, can we say that those who couldn’t afford the best coaching and thus scored low are actually less meritorious?

India has about 50 school boards across the country. The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) is one of them. It is a national board and has a pan-India presence, but it still accounts for about 10 per cent of the total students passing out the 10+2, senior secondary, or intermediate examinations. Most entrance examinations synchronise their syllabuses primarily with the CBSE and thus favour students of schools affiliated with it. Conversely, it comes at a huge disadvantage for those coming from the state board. The success rate of their students is often quite low, not because those boards are inferior but because they are examined on a different set of syllabi.

Sending children to school these days is not regarded as adequate. Parents work on their children at least as much as their teachers do in school, except, of course, for those who can afford to send their children to day-boarding or residential schools. First-generation learners are obviously at a huge disadvantage as they do not have as much family endowment and support simply because their parents are not educated enough to help them with their homework and guide them to better career goals and opportunities. Can or should such students be labelled less meritorious? Will they still score so much less in the competitive examination if they have quality family support?

Buying supplementary study support for children has become more of a norm than an exception. Those who can somehow afford to arrange tuition for their children right from early classes onward do so. Those unable to afford tuition may suffer a loss of learning and lag behind in the highly selective competitive entrance examination. Must we call such students laggards on merit?

Economic affordability manifests in many other myriad ways, in signalling merit. Students with parents of means often break their studies for a few years to exclusively devote their time and energy to preparing for the entrance examination. This is obviously an expensive proposition for people with limited means. They can neither afford to take the risk nor bear the opportunity cost that such decisions entail. Can we, or should we, call them unmeritorious if they score less than those who could afford to give two to three years of their time and money learning to crack the examination?

As the seat-to-application ratio in premiere higher educational institutions has been skyrocketing, the competition for admission has become cutthroat. In such a situation, the national-level common entrance tests make the process highly skewed in favour of the rich, wealthy, and upper middle class—the people with means and endowments. It is no less than a tyranny that means and influence are often confused with merit. Ironically, this is done with no qualms about the absence of a level playing field for all sections of society to access opportunities equitably.

(The writer is a former advisor
for education in the Planning
Commission and is a professor at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.)