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Comment by rutherblood | Hacker News Reader

This exact problem plagues India. The public education system is essentially irrelevant here. Teachers hardly make money, even in private schools are hence incentivised towards joining the after-school private coaching industry training highschool kids for hyperc-competitive college entrance exams which is where the real money lies given parents are blindly willing to spend fortunes for even a small chance their kids might do better. Everyone knows regular high-school hours are quickly becoming irrelevant in a country obsessed with entrance exam coaching. Even many schools are getting in on the action with "intergrated post-school coaching". Education has truly become a gigantic business in your country the day even Amazon wants to get in on the action & does.

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I was brought up in rural environment and education was very less competitive untill I finished 12th. When I got into city into a private engineering college with much high fees and hostel cost, everything in education also felt rushed and sub-optimal.

Nobody has the incentive to teach properly. But until I entered the big college, the pretentiousness of 'heavy' education (which is basically making us grunt work because the professors are relatively very unskilled ) and associated stress was low.

And that's one of the "top" colleges of the state. Professors couldn't properly write a java program using threads or collections and had the audacity to tell us to write every program two times __on fucking paper__.

This country's education system is pretentious AF. The institutions are mostly incentivized to sell snake oil to rich urban parents. The urban parents are pushing their kids into a rat race.

Edit: sorry for venting out here.

I stayed in one of those integrated school/coaching centers. It was miserable. The sole purpose of the place was make us learn as much as possible for engineering exams in those 2 years and nothing else. Luckily I had some good teachers and learnt how to learn stuff on my own. So I'm not completely bitter about it.

One of those places in Hyd by any chance? That city is famous of this.

I think the real solution for both, India and China, is to reform how students are evaluated for entry to college. It seems lazy to block coaching-classes/edtechs when they are simply picking up the slack in public education, and taking advantage of an ecosystem that encourages them to thrive.

It's hard to imagine an evaluation system that doesn't lead to the arms race, when there's a lot of competition for comparatively scarce positions. What's your idea?

Any metric that becomes a target and all that.

The number of opportunities in both jobs and universities whose degrees are meaningful is far less than the number of people. And the consequences of not getting one of those opportunities is much bigger than say, in the US.

I think this could be solved by including randomization. E.g., if the top schools currently take the top 5% of students by test score, then they could instead consider the top 25% of students and select 20% of them through a lottery. In that case there is still value to performing well on the test, but you can't singularly focus on success through testing well.

Students and their parents would need to plan out a career path assuming they don't get into the best schools. They could still spend time and money on education and personal development, but it wouldn't be singularly directed at test prep. Instead, there'd be more focus on developing the foundational knowledge, critical thinking, and diligent habits that promote career success.

Came to suggest this. Has a variety of applications.

And as you point out, if it's all or nothing, or massively increasing returns then the people near the cutoff/bend in the curve fight like hell to stay on the right side of the line instead of rebalancing the incentives.

Basically turns education into a lottery where everyone spends lots of money to buy a lot of tickets because there's no sensible alternative. So appropriate that one of the solutions is to run an actual lottery that you can't buy more tickets for.

Banning tuition seems like a surprisingly far-sighted move, wonder what else they'll come up with and how it'll work out.

I disagree. Banning tuition is a very stupid move. All they did was to deprive poorer kids from accessing these facilities. The families of kids with resources are going to find a way to subvert the ban anyway.

You can always bribe yourself to a winning lottery ticket

The societal benefits of maintaining fairness in opportunities to move up the economic ladder (speaking about India here) far outweighs other criteria. While one could argue that access to coaching institutes creates an unfair barrier on its own, in practice coaching institutes often teach good students of lesser means for free (because they can advertise their results and good results attract more students to coaching institutes).

These top colleges (in India) are literally a pathway to economic betterment of extended families as they're very affordable (lower income families essentially pay no fees), reasonably good and pretty much guarantee an upper middle class exit. I think introducing any shade of unfairness into this process even if it reflects underlying unfairness of life will damage soceital cohesion.

Source: studied in these colleges and know personally several classmates of very modest means whose extended families benefited from their success. Also personally know a few people in China who have equivalent stories.

The focus of those seeking to help kids is on completely the wrong things. The solution doesn't really lie in optimising the coaching exam system - sure it can be improved but the leverage of outcome is very low - but rather in the larger economy. We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system. This would do more to ease the pressure on kids and families than any regulation on the coaching industry would.

> We need more businesses, better regulation, sleeker government and policing system.

We need these things for good reasons, but the skill premium is here to stay. Both in the West and even more so (because differences are so vast, and redistributing incomes is not exactly feasible) in developing countries like China and India.

We're seeing similar in the United States. Parents are expected to take on 6 figure debts to pay for their children's college education. If you don't have a college degree, with few exceptions your career is vocational. We could stop looking down on this alternative vocational path, and we could have a free public higher education system but there's too much money to be made in selling degrees and dreams.

No one is expected to take on 6 figure debts. There are plenty of public universities that can rival Ivies and many elite, private universities have extensive aid programs. You can complete an engineering degree in an in-state school for less than $30k debt after aid.

People still get on absurd levels of debt but there’s a large personal decision component there.

What you buy yourself is a contact network that you would not get at the public school.

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