By the time my penultimate article for this year hits the stands, the ultimate question, “when will the medical college admission for the academic year 2025-26 come to a close” will continue to be an enigmatic riddle wrapped in a mysterious package. In a system where an aspirational and gargantuan demand is oversized by regulated and limited supply, medical college admissions continue to hog the professional college admissions puzzle. The other professional college entrance exams-based admission processes have their own share of the complexities—either too early as in the case of law, or too much as in the case of engineering. Besides this, the efforts to streamline admissions for non-professional degree programmes are failing to gather the much-needed momentum to ensure smooth flow of high traffic. With Higher Education Commission of India (HECI) Bill in its advanced stage of becoming a law soon, there is hope now which cannot become delayed disappointment later. Here is how.

In the jocular words of my good friend Prof. R Vaidyanathan (former professor of management at IIM-B), the demand for education will always increase as every Indian housewife wants their kids to be more intelligent than their husband. In a system where the demand-supply gap is distorted in different unfathomable ways, the need for calibrated policy for calculated clarity cannot come at a time more appropriate than now. The social media is buzzing with startling findings on manipulative school grades that’s pulling down the higher education system in the US. Many, in addition to University of California, San Diego, have started to express similar experiences as well. This on one hand, the 10 per cent p.a. growing coaching class industry in India is poised to hit a cool USD 20 billion by 2035 on the other hand, thanks to the hotter and loftier JEE and NEET craze. The growth of the Indian coaching class industry is driven by JEE, NEET, CAT, CLAT, etc. peaks triggered by progressive gross enrolment ratio. The Physicswallah IPO may have assured all retail investors a share allotment. Will the entrance exams assure every coaching class student an admission allotment? Definitely not.

In many of my previous articles, I have highlighted the voluminous traffic due to multiple entrance exams have not only caused stress and increased student anxiety but also enriched institutions top line. Today, the National Testing Agency (NTA) is one of the world’s leading testing agencies capable of handling close to 100 million exams a year. With JEE, NEET, CUET still having the lion’s share of the assessments, the need for multiple entrance exams when student registration is not brimming with vacant exam slots available in abundance raises more questions than answers. While there is vacancy in exam slots, there is still multiplicity in entrance exams. In the schooling system, seats for premier schools are getting filled by newborns in a jiffy without any entrance exam and school education is running a sprinting marathon—a marathon to infuse life-long learning for kids and a sprint for success in JEE-NEET type exams. Sandwiched between the two sides, which side of the bread needs to be buttered is a foggy dilemma. As responsible policy makers, we cannot afford to butter only one side. There is a compelling need to balance students’ formative years through normative schooling and advanced years through collaborative benchmarking. Here are some starters for the second part of the learning life cycle to unburden student load.

The National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 has laid down clear pathways for school education to make it more creative and flexible with a view to make it more compatible with multi-disciplinary higher education. This being the case, the fundamental approach towards the currently deployed stereotyped entrance exam for professional college admissions needs overhaul. There is a no global template for the current Indian model which needs to adopt global best practices. In the spirit of co-operative federalism, there needs to be a good mix of school and entrance exam performance for admissions to higher education institutions (HEIs). The multiple exam syndrome can be mitigated by a multiple chance prescription for students who can take the same exam more than once. This will not only reduce pressure but also increase entrance exams lifeline for students and narrow revenue pipeline for many private HEIs. The starters are not limited by these three and there is more. It is in the proposed HECI and other reform processes lie the streamlining of professional college admission system. In short: Streamlining has Silver Lining and I see it coming.