Twenty Years of Unlearning School: What Zoho Schools Taught Me About Rebuilding Education System
- Dr Sp Mishra
- Aug 5
- 6 min read
I recently sat down with Mr Rajendran Dandapani of Zoho Schools of Learning for the India Career Centre podcast, expecting to talk about an alternative education model. I left the conversation with something more unsettling: a running list of assumptions about school, work, and credentials that I hadn't questioned in years, because nobody around me was questioning them either.
Here's what stayed with me.
The man who built an anti-degree institution never finished his own degree
Mr Dandapani got into IIT Madras electronics and electrical engineering the hard way years of narrow, dedicated preparation, in an era when the entrance exam was already brutal. Then he found the campus computer center, got pulled in, and stopped showing up for anything else. He missed enough credits that the institute asked him to leave. His father, he told me, had a stroke when he heard the news.
He's candid that this wasn't rebellion or vision. It was closer to addiction, just to programming instead of a substance. He left IIT with no degree and a hard-won, self-taught fluency in building software people actually wanted to use. A small Chennai startup called Vembu Systems ,later renamed Zoho, hired him anyway, as employee number seven, on the strength of what he could build rather than the paper he didn't have.
That detail matters, because it means Zoho Schools wasn't dreamed up by an outsider theorizing about credentialism. It was built by people who had personally paid the cost of the system they went on to reject.
The founding motive was selfish and that's the honest part
Ask most institutions about their origin story and you get a mission statement. Mr Dandapani gave me something more useful: the actual sequence of events.
Around 2005, Zoho then a small, unknown company that couldn't get top colleges to even let it recruit on campus had a talent problem. Product teams needed great engineers. HR couldn't attract them, because the company wasn't famous yet, and it wasn't famous yet because it didn't have the products great engineers would have built. A closed loop.
So the founder, Mr Sridhar Vembu, asked a different question: if the talent pipeline won't come to us, can we build our own? Six students, two faculty (drawn from Zoho's own senior engineers, not academics), three subjects, a spare meeting room, no fees. Twelve months later, the results were strong enough to convince the company this wasn't a one-off.
Mr Dandapani is unusually direct about this: it wasn't philanthropy first. It was a company solving its own hiring problem, and the social impact, rural and economically disadvantaged students getting a shot they'd otherwise never get came along as a consequence, not the original plan. He compares it to Google: nobody built the world's dominant search engine purely as a gift to humanity, but the gift was still real. Selfish motives and genuine social value aren't mutually exclusive. I found that more convincing than a founding myth would have been.
Twenty years on, the numbers are hard to argue with: roughly 17,000–18,000 applicants a year, a few hundred admitted, four campuses across Tamil Nadu, schools of technology, design, and business. Almost the entire graduating cohort stays at Zoho for their whole career. Seven of the eight students from the very first batch are now senior managers inside the company.
What the classroom actually looks like
This is the part I think most educators and most parents need to sit with.
Zoho Schools doesn't take attendance. It doesn't run examinations. Its entrance test doesn't look for the highest scorers; it looks for people with a genuine appetite for solving problems, deliberately including students who couldn't otherwise afford an engineering or medical seat.
The reasoning, as Mr Dandapani laid it out, is uncomfortably logical once you hear it:
Time-driven learning is broken. A conventional class moves everyone from grade 5 to grade 6 together, regardless of whether a student actually mastered 100% of grade 5 or scraped by on a 40% pass mark. He borrows this critique directly from Mr Salman Khan's The One World Schoolhouse, the idea that the only defensible pass mark is 100, and that students should be allowed to take one year or two years for a milestone, based on mastery, not the calendar.
Mixed-age cohorts matter. Classrooms are the only environment in life where people spend most of their time exclusively with others their own age. Zoho Schools deliberately mixes 17-to-24-year-olds, closer to how a real workplace or the old Gurukul system actually functions.
Collaboration is the point, not the violation. Students are explicitly told to work with the people next to them, to build on what already exists, to remix rather than sit an invigilated exam under a ticking clock. Mr Dandapani's line has stuck with me: nobody in a real job is ever told to be creative in exactly forty-five minutes, alone, without consulting anyone.
No affiliation with any university, on principle. Partly because the pace of technological change makes a nine-year textbook revision cycle (his example: Tamil Nadu's state board computer science syllabus still teaching a 2008-era SQL standard) actively harmful. Partly because, as he put it, handing a rejected-by-degrees student a different kind of degree, just glossier paper doesn't actually resolve the injustice of the system; it just launders it.
Scaling without scaling
I expected the natural next question, how do you scale this to fix Indian higher education at large? to trip him up. It didn't.
Mr Dandapani distinguishes two kinds of scale. One is headcount: grow from 5 students to 5,000. Zoho has deliberately avoided that, in part because AI-driven uncertainty about future engineering headcount has already cut this year's intake nearly in half compared to last year. The other kind of scale is reproducibility: publish the model openly enough that other companies can clone it in their own city, their own sector, their own budget. Several companies already have, quietly, without much noise.
This connects to something Sridhar Vembu says often, according to Dandapani: India doesn't need one giant Zoho with 100,000 employees. It needs a thousand smaller Zohos — companies that are fiercely independent, don't chase venture capital, don't relocate to Bangalore just because that's where IT companies are supposed to be, and instead prove that great software can be built from a smaller town on the company's own terms. Zoho Schools' actual scaling strategy leans on this: opening admission to Zoho's 2,000+ partner ecosystem companies, not just Zoho itself, so graduates who are "soaked in the culture" can go build elsewhere too.
Maruppadi: the same model, aimed at women returning to work
One thread I hadn't expected: Zoho runs a sister program called Maruppadi, a six-month "returnship" for women coming back to the workforce after career breaks ranging from six months to fourteen years. It borrows the same mixed-age, mentorship-heavy structure as Zoho Schools, deliberately placing returning women alongside 17-to-24-year-old students each group picking up something the other has: institutional wisdom in one direction, current energy and tools in the other. Around 90–95 women have gone through it so far; several are now full-time Zoho employees.
It started, by Mr Dandapani's account, as a reaction against the once-a-year Women's Day video that companies put out and then forget about for the remaining 364 days. Whether or not that's the whole story, the fact that an intentional infrastructure now exists for it not a one-off gesture, is the part worth noting.
Where this leaves me
I don't think the point of this conversation is "every company should build a Zoho Schools." Mr Dandapani was explicit about that himself: he isn't claiming his model is the answer for everyone. His actual claim is narrower and, I think, more useful stop outsourcing the redesign of your education system to whichever model worked for the last generation, and start actually experimenting, in your own context, with what mastery-based, apprenticeship-heavy, credential-optional learning could look like.
For an audience thinking about careers, admissions, and what "employability" even means anymore, that's the real takeaway: the gap between what schools certify and what work actually requires isn't going to be closed by another exam reform. It's going to be closed, if it's closed at all, by institutions willing to run the twenty-year experiment Zoho Schools already has.
About the Author:
Dr SP Mishra is the Founder of India Career Centre, a Hyderabad-based career guidance, study-abroad consulting and educational research organisation. He writes and speaks on career decision-making, higher education, skills, employability and the future of work in India. Also hosts the India Career Centre Podcast. Connect on LinkedIn.
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