My twin grandchildren are moving to the 12th grade. It was interesting to look at their efforts to select a university/college for pursuing graduate education in August 2023. The colleges have well-set systems to market their wares. Through the last couple of weeks the children have been visiting over 15 colleges spread from the mid-west to the east coast of the US. They were participating in the tours arranged by dozens of colleges, each spread over 2-3 hours. They started from the University of Chicago and moved through several states to visit colleges at Pittsburg, Boston, Connecticut, New Jersey, New York, Detroit, Indiana… These included a number of Ivy League institutions like Yale, Harvard, Brown, Columbia…
In most places the admissons office leaders present an overview of the institution, with the undergrad students of the college taking groups of aspirants to different sections of the institution and narrating their own experiences. There are presentations about universities global reach, mix of students, opportunities to keep pace with latest developments in various subjects and the prospects for jobs and career advancements. There is the typical high power marketing characteristic of the US.
Of course, the courses are expensive, especially in high-end institutions, estimated to cost anything from Rs 60 lakh to a crore per year for four years. Just around 3 per cent of applicants are selected (in a typical Ivy League institution, I gather, there are about 50,000 applications for 1500 seats).
These offer a vast range of subjects of study. Columbia, for example, offers over 100 courses! The competition is also from applicants across the 50 US states and also from across the globe.
I was contrasting this with our experience in India: a couple of
generations ago the selection of a college and the subject were decided mostly by the parent in the 1950s to 1970s; today hundreds of universities and institutions in India also market their specialties. These adopt the decades’ old systems of leading universities in the US and Europe.
