Indian Education System Needs to Move From Selection to Development

Sep 25

11 min read

Listen to the BlogDr SP Mishra

17:40

Whenever a student suicide occurs at one of India's premier educational institutions, the discussion understandably turns towards academic pressure, intense competition, ragging, loneliness, family expectations, financial stress, mental health and the availability of counselling support. All of these can matter, and in individual cases there may be several factors interacting with one another. Student suicide is a complex phenomenon and it would be inappropriate to reduce it to any single cause. However, there is another dimension that deserves much greater attention: the structure of the educational journey itself and the way in which we prepare young people to enter, navigate and, when necessary, change their educational and career paths.

This essay does not attempt to cover every structural cause of distress at these institutions, questions of identity-based discrimination and social exclusion on campus, for instance, are serious and well-documented in their own right, and deserve treatment on their own terms rather than a passing mention here. What follows is a narrower argument: about selection, mobility, and the absence of a credible way to change course once a young person is inside the system.

We ask teenagers to make very consequential choices

The journey towards a premier institution often begins much earlier than college. By the time students are 15 or 16, many have already started making decisions about streams, competitive examinations and possible careers. The entry barriers to some of India's most prestigious institutions are extremely high. In 2026, roughly 1.9 lakh students appeared for JEE Advanced; only 56,880 qualified for JoSAA counselling; and against that, only around 18,663 seats existed across all 23 IITs. Similar arithmetic governs entry into NEET medical colleges, CLAT law schools and other prestigious gateways: the number preparing dwarfs the number who eventually get in.

Over several years, the message surrounding the student can become remarkably consistent: getting into an IIT, a top medical college, a leading law school or another prestigious institution is the destination, and coaching is the pathway to reach it. Ranks become an important measure of ability, admission becomes the objective, and the enormous effort invested by the student, parents and coaching ecosystem can make the eventual admission appear to validate the entire journey.

But there is an important question that we rarely ask with the same seriousness: was the student actually prepared to make such a consequential career decision at the age at which we expected them to make it?

A student entering higher education is often only 17 or 18 years old. At that age, most young people are still developing an understanding of their own strengths, interests, capabilities and personality. They may know which subjects they enjoy, or which examinations they perform well in, but that is not necessarily the same as understanding what kind of professional life they would find meaningful or sustainable.

Yet we expect them to make decisions that can influence the next four or five years of their education and potentially several decades of their professional life.

The decision is rarely made by the student alone. Parents have expectations, peers influence choices, society attaches prestige to certain professions, schools are often heavily examination-oriented, and coaching ecosystems naturally reinforce particular pathways. In such an environment, the student may enter a programme carrying not only an academic workload but also the expectations of everyone who believes that the chosen path must succeed.

Getting in is difficult. Changing direction can be even harder.

There is an irony in the way our education system operates. We have become remarkably sophisticated at selecting students for competitive programmes, but we are far less sophisticated when it comes to helping students change direction after they have been selected.

Once a student enters a highly competitive programme, changing the course, institution or career pathway can be extraordinarily difficult. The formal mechanisms may exist in some institutions, but for many students the practical, academic, financial and social barriers make such changes difficult. The result is that a decision made at 17 or 18 can acquire a sense of permanence that it perhaps should never have had.

I have encountered several students during my counselling conversations who completed engineering degrees with a large number of backlogs and subsequently remained unclear about what they wanted to do professionally. Some had struggled throughout the programme, while others had realised at some point that the course was not aligned with their interests or capabilities. A few had considered changing their course but were unable to do so without significant disruption to their education.

The problem in such situations is not necessarily a lack of ability. Sometimes the problem is simply that the fit is wrong. A student may have the intellectual capability to complete a programme but may not have the interest or motivation required to sustain four years of demanding study. Another student may discover that the professional life associated with the degree is very different from what they had imagined. Someone else may develop an entirely different interest during college.

These are normal possibilities in a young person's development. What is unusual is how difficult our system can make it to respond to them.

Changing direction should not automatically be interpreted as failure. A good education system should allow a young person to say that they have discovered that their chosen path is not suitable and then provide credible alternatives. Instead, we often make the original choice increasingly difficult to reverse because of the time already invested, the money spent, the expectations of parents and the social prestige associated with the institution or degree.

This lack of educational and career mobility is an important part of the conversation that is often missing.

Where is the conversation before the crisis?

Another weakness is that counselling in our education system is often treated as an intervention that becomes necessary after something has already gone wrong. We need to think about counselling much more broadly.

Career counselling should not begin only when a student is confused after Class 12. Psychological counselling should not begin only when a student is already in serious distress. Academic counselling should not begin only after a student has accumulated backlogs or failed examinations.

There should instead be continuous conversations throughout the educational journey. Students should have opportunities to understand their strengths, interests, learning styles, motivations and areas of difficulty, while also being exposed to a much wider understanding of careers and professional possibilities. Such conversations can help identify whether a student's interests have changed, whether they are struggling to cope with the demands of their programme and whether the path they have chosen continues to make sense for them.

Psychometric assessments can potentially play a useful supporting role in this process. They cannot and should not determine a student's future, nor should they replace conversations with experienced counsellors, teachers and parents. However, standardised assessments can provide additional information about interests, strengths and behavioural preferences and can reduce some of the personal biases that inevitably enter purely subjective assessments. They can also make it possible to bring structured career exploration to a much larger population than traditional one-to-one counselling can reach.

The objective should not be to tell a teenager what career they must choose. It should be to help the teenager develop a better understanding of themselves before making important decisions.

Parents need to be part of the conversation

Parents are another critical part of this ecosystem. Most parents want the best for their children and are willing to make enormous financial and emotional investments in their education. Naturally, they want their children to enter prestigious institutions and build stable and rewarding careers. There is nothing inherently wrong with that aspiration.

The problem arises when prestige becomes a substitute for suitability.

Every child is different, and every child does not need to become an engineer, doctor or lawyer. The world requires professionals across an enormous range of disciplines, and the future economy will require capabilities extending well beyond the traditional list of professions that Indian society has historically considered prestigious.

Parents therefore need better information and more opportunities to participate meaningfully in career conversations with their children. They also need to become comfortable asking difficult questions when everything appears to be going according to plan. Is the child actually enjoying the course? Is the student able to cope with the academic demands? Is the problem temporary, or has the student begun to realise that the chosen path is fundamentally unsuitable? Would changing direction be a more sensible option than continuing simply because significant time and money have already been invested?

These conversations can be difficult because parents themselves may feel that changing course represents a failure of the investment they have made in their child's education. After years of preparation for a competitive examination and substantial expenditure on coaching and higher education, accepting that the chosen path may not be working can be emotionally difficult.

But changing direction is not necessarily a failure. Sometimes it is simply another form of learning.

The role of educational institutions must also change

We also need to reconsider what we expect from schools, colleges and premier institutions. An educational institution cannot define its responsibility merely as delivering a curriculum, conducting examinations and producing graduates. Its larger social responsibility should be to help create capable individuals who can participate meaningfully in society and navigate the uncertainties of professional and personal life.

Academic excellence remains important, but it is only one component of that development. Communication, collaboration, resilience, self-awareness, ethical reasoning, adaptability and the ability to make decisions about one's own life are equally important capabilities. A student who receives excellent grades but has never learnt how to deal with failure, uncertainty or a change of direction may still be poorly prepared for life beyond the institution.

Premier institutions, in particular, need systems through which students can seek help without feeling that asking for help represents failure. Counselling cannot exist merely as a room somewhere on campus with a counsellor waiting for students to walk through the door. There needs to be a broader culture of conversation in which faculty members can recognise when students are struggling, students have trusted channels through which they can discuss academic and personal difficulties, parents understand when and how they can participate appropriately, and institutions have mechanisms for helping students explore alternatives when the original academic path is proving unsuitable.

None of this requires lowering academic standards. The objective should instead be to ensure that high standards do not become synonymous with a single definition of success.

Policy has promised mobility. It has not yet built it.

The fourth building block is the role of policymakers, governments and governing bodies. Educational policy is often discussed in terms of enrolment, examination outcomes, institutional rankings, infrastructure and expansion. These metrics are important, but they do not capture the entire purpose of education.

The policy answer usually offered here is the Academic Bank of Credits (ABC), introduced under NEP 2020 and positioned explicitly as the mechanism for exactly this kind of mobility. On paper, it is meant to let a student bank academic credits digitally and redeem them across institutions, with up to 40% of those credits drawn from MOOCs, supporting a "multiple entry, multiple exit" model.

In practice, ABC is a credit-storage and credit-portability system, not a pathway-change system. It makes it somewhat easier to carry credits between broadly similar programmes or to exit and re-enter the same kind of course later. It does not offer a functioning mechanism for a student two years into an engineering degree to pivot into humanities or commerce and graduate on a reasonable timeline; there is no cross-disciplinary equivalence framework that would make those credits mean anything on the receiving end. A student attempting that pivot today would still be starting substantially from scratch.

Implementation has also lagged the ambition, though the picture is no longer just one of slipping deadlines. The UGC's latest deadline, 30 June 2026, for institutions to upload credit data for the 2025 examination year actually held this time. But the government's own progress report, filed just days after the deadline, shows how far uptake still has to go: across all 23 IITs combined, only around 1.09 lakh APAAR IDs had been created and roughly 3.4 lakh credit records mapped, figures that, set against total enrolment at these institutions, point to partial and uneven adoption rather than the system-wide infrastructure NEP envisioned. Karnataka has also declined to participate in the national system altogether, building its own parallel credit platform instead, which has created its own complications for students trying to access records across state lines.

None of this means the underlying idea is wrong. It means the gap between the policy promise and the lived reality is still wide, and closing it will require something more ambitious than better plumbing for credit transfer, it requires an actual framework for moving between disciplines, not just between institutions offering the same one.

Students who discover an interest in another discipline should have structured pathways through which they can transition without losing years. Those who need a break should have opportunities to return without being permanently disadvantaged. Institutions should also be encouraged to think about student wellbeing and progression as part of their institutional responsibility rather than treating counselling as a standalone service that becomes visible primarily after a crisis.

India's education system is enormous and extraordinarily diverse. A policy that works for an elite institution in one city may not be directly transferable to a small college elsewhere. Policymaking therefore has to recognise the complexity of the country and the very different capacities of its institutions. But complexity cannot become an excuse for avoiding structural reform.

From selection to development

Perhaps the larger problem is that we have built much of our education ecosystem around selection. We select students who perform well, select those who secure high ranks, select those who gain admission to premier institutions and then celebrate the students who successfully complete demanding programmes.

But education should be about much more than selection. It should be about development.

A young person should have the opportunity to discover their strengths, explore their interests, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, change direction and gradually develop the capabilities required for a meaningful professional and personal life. Some students will thrive in highly competitive environments, while others will discover that a different educational or professional environment suits them better. Some will find that the course they fought hard to enter is exactly right for them, while others will discover that it is not. Our system should be capable of accommodating both outcomes.

This is particularly important when we discuss student distress at premier institutions. The question should not be limited to whether the institution had a counselling centre, whether the academic workload was excessive or whether the student had access to mental-health support. Those questions matter, but we also need to ask whether the broader educational system gave the student sufficient opportunities to understand themselves, seek help, change direction and imagine a future beyond the path they had originally chosen.

If a young person enters an institution after years of intense competition, discovers that the chosen path does not suit them, struggles academically or personally, and then feels that leaving or changing direction is impossible, the absence of alternatives can itself become an additional source of pressure.

That does not make the education system the sole explanation for an individual tragedy. It does, however, point towards a structural question that deserves much greater attention.

Are we building an education system that is exceptionally good at deciding who gets in, but not yet good enough at helping young people decide where they belong?

If we want to address student distress seriously, the answer cannot be limited to adding more counselling centres after a crisis. We need to examine the entire journey: how students are guided when choosing their streams, how they understand their strengths and interests, how parents participate in those decisions, how institutions support students after admission, and how easily a young person can change direction when the original choice turns out to be wrong.

The ultimate objective of education cannot simply be to get young people into India's premier institutions.

It must be to help them become capable, confident and resilient adults, while ensuring that when one educational or career path does not work, there is always another path available.

Further reading

On the entry-selection problem: