Nishat Paiker
The meltdown has started showing its effect on the educational dreams of thousands of prospective students who wanted to study abroad and become doctors or engineers.
In my previous blog, 'MBA during recession', I said MBA is still a good career choice as recession or no recession the demand will not fall for best managers who can handle critical situations like particularly during recession. Taking forward the issue of career choices during recession, let me share this information piece which I came across this morning on a popular news channel site, which reports a sharp decline in the students appearing for GRE this year.
Graduate Record Exam (GRE), is an admissions requirement for many graduate schools mainly in the US and other English speaking countries generally taken by students aspiring for postgraduate medicine and engineering studies. The article reported those taking the GRE this year is down 22% and in colleges that train students for GRE, the dip is more than 50%. Even ETS which conducts GRE reported earlier, it expects to administer only about 621,000 to 625,000 tests by the end of this year, a decrease from last year's record high of 633,000. The drop is slight but is a cause of concern for postgraduate educators, who expected an increase like those seen for the GMAT (10.4 %) and the LSAT (6.2 %), the entrance exams for business and law schools, respectively. Typically during a downturn, interest in graduate school goes up.
Reasons for Drop in GRE Test Takers
On an average Rs 60,000 to Rs 1 Lac is spent to take the GRE and complete formalities for admission to a US university while college fees etc add up to anywhere between Rs 17-21 Lac.
Thus studying abroad especially in US becomes an expensive proposition for a student. Particularly when value of dollar is high against rupee, the overall education budget is obviously to go up affecting the decision of studying abroad.
This may be one of the reasons for the shift in inclination. The other possible reasons may be:
- Bleak job prospects in US with recession seeing thousands of lay offs and shutdown.
- Increase in value of dollar against rupee due to which education in US gets costlier for Indian students.
- Apprehension among students and parents whether they will survive in foreign country in terms of paying rent for the house, food and other expenses.
- Fear of difficulty in availability of loans for foreign education. The credit crunch in US may affect the financial support that varsities provide to foreign students.
Temporary Phase
This doesn't mean it will continue to be so. This may be a temporary phase. There is hope of revival of the market and so the education budgets of families. The flow will turn towards higher studies as current scenario is of playing safe and keeping the earnings. This is the reason students generally prefer very job oriented courses which are not so expensive to pursue and studying abroad dreams are put on hold for the time being.
Grass is Greener this Side
The last seven years saw Indian students topping the number of foreign students studying in the US universities. This number is seeing a drop this year. Now the trend may catch up cashing on loads of education opportunities present in India which has more secure social and economic environment.
