THE COACHING GAME
Choosing the right coaching institute can be a daunting task. Our annual ranking of the coaching institutes across the country gives you all the information to pick the one that best suits your needs
Education is among the top five fastest-growing commodities in terms of private consumer expenditure in India. Given a choice, Indians prefer spending on education than healthcare and, as economic surveys of the country have shown, continue to spend more on education irrespective of the change in their income level. Yet, it is often argued that the mainstream education system in India suffers from multiple limitations—poor infrastructure, dearth of trained teachers and outdated curriculums. Regular school education is unequipped to prepare students for highly com
petitive entrance examinations. It was perhaps guided by this criticism that the Centre announced a massive overhaul of the education system through its New Education Policy (NEP) in July.
Implementing the NEP will be a long-term exercise. Students, meanwhile, will find recourse in coaching institutes to bridge the gap between classroom learning and preparation for entrance exams. This stress to clear entrance tests has led to a kind of “coaching boom” in India, with some cities emerging as coaching hubs. Data from the National Sample Survey Office’s 71st round survey reveal that more than a quarter of Indian students—over 70 million—take private coaching, and around 12 per cent of a family’s expenses go towards private coaching.
Not surprisingly then, according to research agency CRISIL, preparing students for entrance tests is projected to become a Rs 70,200 crore business by 2021, growing at a CAGR of 13 per cent. Another global agency, Technavio, predicts that between 2018 and 2022, the market will grow at a CAGR of 16 per cent.
With coaching centres mushrooming across India and on digital platforms, students face the unique challenge of finding the best institute catering to their academic requirements. The sky-high fee many of these institutes charge makes the process more complicated. Recognising a need for an informed opinion, india today has developed a ranking of coaching institutes across India. Launched last year, India’s first survey of its kind examines three categories of classroom-based coaching—for engineering, medical and management entrance examinations. For this exercise, Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA), a reputed market research agency, evaluated institutes on five broad parameters—intake quality and fees, quality of faculty, learning resources, training processes and outcomes. To ensure a robust ranking, all possible stakeholders—former and current faculty members, students and institute management— were consulted. The final ranking was based on the combined scores of
the perceptual survey, objective data and experiential scores (see Methodology). The survey included about 400 institutes across metros and smaller cities. In fact, Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities are playing a key role in driving the growth of the coaching industry. Till a few years ago, the absence of coaching institutes for the poor and for those in rural areas was a critical factor in determining who gets into the top institutes and who is left out.
Even as the world grapples with the Covid-19 pandemic and schools and colleges remain closed, coaching for entrances continues in the digital space. Industry observers say the growth of online coaching is likely to emerge from Tier 2 and 3 cities. Rapid rise in internet infrastructure, driven by smartphones and cheaper data plans, along with wide acceptance of digital payments, will contribute to the growth of online coaching. The adoption of vernacular languages by edtech start-ups, too, is helping. A survey of 10,000 students by Gradeup, an education technology platform, found that 90 per cent respondents preferred online learning to real-world classes for entrances. A comparison between an edtech company and an established coaching chain gives an idea of this phenomenon. Just a year ago, the total revenue of Aakash Institute, one of India’s leading coaching centres, was $150 million (around Rs 1,114 crore)—double of that of BYJU’s ($75 million, or Rs 557 crore). However, the tables have turned. In FY 2019, the total revenue of BYJU’s was $194 million (Rs 1,440.9 crore), 18 per cent higher
than that of Aakash Institute ($165 million, or Rs 1,225.3 crore).
The emerging trend seems to be a hybrid model. While online players have opened centres to provide an offline touch point to students, brickand-mortar coaching institutes, too, are offering app- and web-based solutions to increase their online footprint. With this blend of physical and digital, the coaching industry hopes to cope with a post-Covid world.
Despite massive growth, the coaching industry often makes headlines for the wrong reasons. Critics allege it is driven only by commercial concerns, providing poor-quality education focused on rote learning. According to psychiatrists, the intense curriculum, combined with parental and peer pressure, leads to high levels of levels among students. It is, therefore, important that coaching institutes create a structured module, keeping in mind students’ mental health and socio-economic backgrounds. The geographical barrier has been broken; it’s time to break the economic and qualitative ones too.