Parents’ literacy, income level no bar for IIT entry?

NEWDELHI: The literacy and income levels of parents do not necessarily impede their children from aiming for and gaining admission to the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), according to an inference drawn by IITKanpur from an analysis of this year’s entrance process.

Close to 800 students out of 31,988 who qualified for the Advanced test under the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) , passing which is a prerequisite for admission to the 23 IITs and other centrally funded engineering schools, reported that their parents are illiterate.

The analysis also shows that the annual parental annual income of 8,531 students out of 31,988 who qualified for JEE Advanced was up to R1 lakh per year, the report accessed by HT shows.

“This is the information provided by the students and a margin of error could be there. This information is provided through online portals during the registration of JEE Main exam,” said professor Shalabh, who uses only one name and is the JEE Advanced chairman from IITKanpur.

The trends from this year’s JEE (Advanced) were analysed by IIT Kanpur, which organised his year’s edition of the test .

The analysis showed that 77% of students who qualified for the exam were from urban India and 23% from rural areas (village – 10% and towns – 13%). This year marked the first time that the entire JEE Advanced test took place online.

“A lot of SC/ST (scheduled caste/scheduled tribe) students are also first-generation learners and they lack guidance and IITs must recognise this as a distinct issue and address it like the way they have done it for those who face financial hurdles. Even if we assume that there is a certain error in the income data, even then it is quite significant and IITs offer scholarship to ensure such students don’t face any problem,” said Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at IIT-Kanpur.

IIT-Kanpur also did an analysis of educational qualifications of parents whose children qualified for joint counselling to IITs, National Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs) and other government-funded institutes.

Of the 31,988 students who qualified for admission to IITs/ NITs/IIITs, among other institutes, parents of 796 students were illiterate, 4,284 had studied up to the matriculation level and 12,923 were graduates; parents of 8,238 were employed in government jobs, 5,208 ran their own businesses, and 3,972 were in private jobs. Some 2,604 were engaged in agriculture and 1,388 in engineering.

The study also pointed out that this year more students had relied on coaching to prepare for the test. More than 52% of students attended coaching classes and 44% studied on their own; 0.86 took private tuitions and 1.12% took correspondence courses. In 2016, 52.37% of students who were admitted to IITs studied on their own; the number came down to 50% in 2017.