More smaller town students aim for foreign degrees | Economic Times

The brain drain is accelerating – and not just from Mumbai or Delhi, but from places like Surat and Jamshedpur.Exclusive data from four leading foreign education consultants show that the number of applications for admission in top foreign universities from non-metros is growing twice as fast as metro cities.ReachIvy, Collegify, LilacBuds and Yocket attributed the trend to greater internet penetration that boosts their exposure and more time at home to explore options due to Covid-19 even as reverse migration induced by the pandemic slowed down applications from top cities. The trend is visible across different courses across fields in both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, they said.81642701At ReachIvy, non-metro applicants now make up 60% of the entire pool, with applications growing 50% in the last year alone, its founder Vibha Kagzi said. The growth from metros was 20%.Students from smaller cities such as Bhopal, Lucknow, Surat, Kanpur, Raipur and Coimbatore are applying to top tier schools in the US, Canada and across Europe and many are benefiting from top colleges’ increased focus on diversity, Kagzi said.“Several top colleges are reaching smaller cities to recruit talented students for their programmes,” she said. “They want to give opportunity to students from smaller cities who have limited reach to higher education.”At Collegify, the number of applications from non-metros has nearly doubled in the last year. Students from Jaipur, Jamshedpur, Kota and Indore have done really well, its chief executive Adarsh Khandelwal said.At coaching hub Kota, where students typically used to study to crack the JEE exam to get into Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), Khandelwal estimates that about one in ten students is now contemplating going abroad.Students from smaller towns may even have a better chance as they have a more “compelling story to tell” that is attractive to colleges, he said. For instance, 17-year-old Pratyush Sudhakar from Kota got a full scholarship to study computer science at Cornell this year. Sudhakar had not just done well academically but had also invented a contraption that would help drivers stay awake while driving and had been involved in social projects such as helping lorry drivers get personal insurance.Consultants said with increasing exposure and easy access to online advice, students from smaller cities are able to better polish their applications, which they say is crucial during admission.Easy availability of credit has also played a big role in more students from smaller towns applying, said Sumeet Jain, cofounder of Yocket, where share of non-metro students has doubled to 40% of all applicants from 20% in the last two years.This also means that education consultancy companies are training their guns on these markets.“We would like to have offices in smaller cities, although it depends on the Covid situation,” said Rajiv Ganjoo, founder of LilacBuds, an Admitas initiative. Students from smaller cities would often fall prey to recruitment agents who place them in middle- or bottom-tier colleges as they got incentives. However, this is changing rapidly now.