In India, The Pressure Cooker Of College Admissions

Competition for admission to India's top school, Delhi University, is particularly fierce. Here students fill out forms at the Arts Faculty in New Delhi, India, on June 21.

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MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. I'm Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: And I'm Audie Cornish. This can be a harrowing time for high school seniors and their parents waiting for responses to college applications, but it hardly compares to what high school students in India go through.

NPR's Corey Flintoff reports that admission to India's top colleges is much tougher than it is even for Ivy League schools here.

COREY FLINTOFF, BYLINE: Many of the candidates for India's top colleges come from exclusive private high schools like this one, the Delhi Public School. On the playing fields, girls and boys in white shirts and neckties play fierce games of cricket and badminton. It's a sort of warm-up for the intensity they'll have to put in to applying for universities.

The school graduated about 1,000 seniors last year, virtually all of whom went on to college. Mamta Sharma, the director of international admissions at the school, says that more than 400 of her graduates qualified for top foreign universities, including prestigious colleges in the United States. She says they fall into two categories.

MAMTA SHARMA: Some who are planning to go abroad, irrespective of Indian university criteria, et cetera. And the other group - they try for India and, if they don't get in, they go abroad.

FLINTOFF: Sharma says some very good students weren't able to get into the Indian colleges of their choice. India is a country of 1.2 billion people and, like most things in life here, getting one of the limited places at the best schools is incredibly competitive.

DINESH SINGH: So it's a very difficult game, given the numbers.

FLINTOFF: That's Dinesh Singh, the vice chancellor of Delhi University, an amalgam of 80 top colleges in the capitol city. It's India's equivalent to Oxford, Cambridge and the American Ivy League. All told, Singh has about 50,000 slots to fill with incoming students each year, but that's a drop in the bucket compared with the more than three million students who are trying to get into colleges throughout the country.

The numbers are so large that most college admissions are based not on a student's performance in high school, but on their scores on a single set of exams. Some colleges expect those scores to be in the high 90s or even 100 percent. Singh says there's simply no other way.

SINGH: There's no way you could interview all of them. Given the diversity, it's very difficult to give weightage(ph) to other aspects of a student's career, and so you largely rely on the test scores.

FLINTOFF: Students complain that making college admissions dependent on a single set of test results is like gambling your career on a single throw of the dice. Saumya Swaroop is one of a growing number of students who are sidestepping the Indian system. She didn't even apply to India's top universities, aiming instead for American schools. She's now on a scholarship at Princeton.

SAUMYA SWAROOP: You could say that the system never really made any sense to me, to be frank. It is - how can they exactly judge the merit of a student on the basis of what happens in a six-hour long exam?

FLINTOFF: Swaroop says India's top schools may be missing talented students who have a lot to offer but simply can't make the cut. The problem's not going to get any easier. More than 120 million Indians will reach college age in the next few years. One way to ease the demand for top flight education might be to allow foreign universities to establish branches in India. The government is considering legislation that could make that possible.

Corey Flintoff, NPR News.

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