Didn’t Get Through IIT? Hey, Why Don’t You Try Harvard Instead?

Satire | Turns out it is easier to get into Harvard than into a desi IIT!

Uffoo! The high pressure.

(Photo: Muhammad Usaid/TheQuint)

Video Editor: Kunal Mehra
Camera: Shiv Kumar Maurya

In India, facing pressure is a given. Whether you are a potato, or a youngster seeking admission in a college.

Too many students, too few colleges, and cut offs so high that even the Burj Khalifa would shy away from them. Not even a 95 percent is enough to guarantee you admission in a top Delhi University college. Part of the reason behind this is that the number of seats available at top Indian colleges is lesser than the number of chips inside a potato chips pack!

Consider for example, the NEET or the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, an entrance examination for all medical and dental courses in the country. This year, it had 66,000 seats on offer. The number of applicants who applied? 13 lakh or 1.3 million.

The JEE Main, on the other hand, saw 1.2 million applicants take the exam, who were fighting for no more than 10,500 seats.

So many hopefuls, so few seats. Gosh, there is a better chance of getting stag entry into a five-star club than getting into a decent Indian college!

But even though IITs may seem too distant a dream for some, Harvard seems a more realistic option.

Harvard Calling

Even though most Ivy League colleges this year had a record low admission rate – for instance it was 4.3 percent for Stanford and 4.59 percent for Harvard – they still couldn’t beat the IITs, for whom the acceptance rate was just the top 1 percent.

Just imagine: Mark Zuckerberg, who dropped out of Harvard wouldn’t even have gotten an admission here!

Of course, an education at Harvard costs millions of rupees and is not something everyone can access easily. But so are the crazy marks, that most of our youth cannot score. They end up getting stuck in a quagmire of lesser opportunities, mediocre colleges, and low placements instead.

Sample this: 8,46,021 CBSE students scored between 33 percent and 90 percent this year. They are the inbetweeners, those who are offered little more than sympathy in an educational system that venerates the toppers. But look, we forgot to talk about them all through the article. Actually, we were just following the educational system, which too has conveniently forgotten them!