Indian students rethink study abroad plans in post-pandemic world
- India is the second-biggest source country for international students behind China, with 1.1 million Indians studying abroad last year
- But as their preferred Western universities struggle to balance health and education, some are looking closer to home
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Siddiqi is just one of hundreds of thousands of Indian students whose plans have had to be put on hold by the pandemic.
But with Western universities – long the preferred choice of Indian students – struggling to balance safety with education in the time of coronavirus, many aspiring scholars are starting to rethink their choices.
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“I am not willing to take up online classes because I want to experience face-to-face teaching,” said Sruzana Kotapati, a Hyderabad-based student who had accepted an offer from Liverpool University in the UK for an advanced computer science course.
“If the September course is moved online, then I would choose to defer my course to January looking into the circumstances,” she said.
It is not just online tuition, either. Indian students are also being put off by dwindling employment options in the countries where they would study, the introduction of virtual graduation ceremonies and recurrent reports of stranded Indian graduates being stuck with hefty rents for their accommodation.
For India’s aspirational middle class, graduating from a foreign academic institution provides a seal of approval in their professional pursuits and remains a personal badge of honour.
Many take out educational loans to chase their dreams, in turn providing foreign universities with a valuable source of revenue.
China, which is already the favoured port of call for Indian students among the country’s neighbours, has also been growing steadily more popular, particular with those who want to study medicine.
“China is now definitely on my radar after seeing the way they’ve handled the coronavirus outbreak compared to other countries,” said Ramya Sampath, a student paramedic who is hunting for universities for her postgraduate course.
According to a recent study by the Indian arm of Quacquarelli Symonds (QS), a UK-based agency that specialises in ranking higher education institutions, nearly half the Indian students who were planning to study non-STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects abroad have since changed their minds.
The ‘Indian Students Mobility Report 2020’ study found that for the 7,300 students from all the country’s states that were surveyed, safety was now the top concern when choosing a place to study, followed by employability.
Ashwin Fernandes, QS regional director for South Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, said he expected there would now be a surge in Indian students enrolling at premier domestic universities rather than foreign institutions.
This would likely be caused by parents, he said, who are “concerned about the health and well-being” of their children while they study abroad.
“Unlike in the Western world, the parents will have a huge say in this,” Fernandes said. “They would prefer the children to do something either online or within India. Definitely, parents are not going to allow their children [to leave the country] at least for this year.”