New Delhi: Last month, a physics teacher at a government school in Delhi received a call from a former student. Yashvardhan Kumar Mishra, 18, who had completed his high school board exam in 2025, was among the top students in his class. The conversation was distressing for the teacher.
Mishra had appeared for the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, or NEET, an all-India level exam for undergraduate medical courses, in May this year, and again in June for a re-test, after papers of the first test were leaked. In the re-test, he scored 92 percentile, which means he did better than 92% of the nearly 2 million students who took the test. But that wasn’t enough to secure a seat in a government medical college, something his family could afford.
Securing a government seat required his score to be among the top 1% of the aspirants, or a score of 99 percentile and above. The family considered opting for a private medical college but gave up due to the steep fees of more than ₹1 crore for the five-and-a-half-year medical degree (including a year’s internship). Mishra explored what his father could afford, such as an Ayurveda (traditional medicine) or a homeopathy course. He even considered enrolling for a degree in nursing.
That came as a shock to the teacher who had taught Mishra physics in high school. “I told him he is too bright to become a nurse,” the teacher, who did not want to be named, said. Eventually, Mishra let go of the nursing option and decided to appear for the NEET exam next year. It will be his final attempt. To prepare for NEET, he has not enrolled in college after finishing high school. So, 2026-27 will be his second ‘drop year’. The stakes are high.
And what if he doesn’t make the cut? “Then I will probably opt for a pharmacy degree,” Mishra said. Even that will cost nearly ₹15 lakh in a private college. There is a tinge of sadness and disappointment as he speaks. And an unmissable sense of weariness in his voice at the inability to crack the entrance exam. Mishra would have to let go of a dream he has nurtured since junior school. Not because he lacks merit. But because too many aspirants are vying for a limited number of seats, in a system that has room for just the top 1–1.5%. In other words, a system designed to exclude.
During the recent students’ protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, sparked by the NEET paper leak, Gen Z youth (those born between 1997 and 2012) and their parents spoke of a growing sense of helplessness. Of sky-high education costs and the difficulty in finding a decent job, going beyond the feelings of betrayal evoked by the paper leak.
The battle is more uphill for students from government schools, those coming from middle- and low-income families or from remote parts of India, who usually find it difficult to afford private coaching, or even a peaceful environment at home to put in the 12–14 hours of daily study required to crack an exam such as NEET.
Mishra fits some of these deprivation criteria, though he did take private coaching for a year, spending over ₹1 lakh. He is using that study material to save on money and the daily commute to the coaching centre, which is a good distance from his home in Badarpur, on the outskirts of the national capital.
Mishra’s father, Raju Kumar Mishra, is anxious. He spent more than ₹10 lakh on his elder son, who earned a Bachelor of Technology degree in computer science engineering from a private college, but is yet to find a job. The senior Mishra, a sampling technologist at a garment exporter, understands that an artificial intelligence (AI) storm is taking away entry-level jobs in the information technology (IT) sector. But he had little inkling of that risk when his elder son enrolled in the course four years ago.
Raju Kumar Mishra, who came to Delhi from Gopalganj in Bihar in search of work more than two decades back and continues to live in rented accommodation, feels that the growing cost of private education has drained his finances. “I spend more every year on my two sons than what my father spent on my entire life’s education. We had to suppress many wishes and desires just to get our children educated,” he said.
He also blames the state for abdicating its responsibilities, making way for expensive private education. A Mint analysis showed that spending on school and higher education by the Union government nearly halved as a percentage of India’s GDP (gross domestic product) over the past decade and a half to just 0.34% in 2025-26. In the 12 years to fiscal year 2026 (FY26), spending on education nearly halved to 2.5% of the total federal budget, while spending on road transport and highways trebled to 5.8%.
“We thought of sending Yash to Kota (a coaching hub in Rajasthan famous for entrance exam preparation) but eventually decided not to. At least at home he could speak with us and that would lighten his stress,” he said. In the back of his mind lurked stories of students committing suicide, unable to handle extreme stress and the failure to crack entrance tests.
Cookie snatcher
Following nationwide agitations, Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan caved to protesters’ demands and resigned on 25 July. A day later, the Centre set up a high-powered task force on exam reforms. But the anxieties that fuelled the student protests—another one against irregularities in state-conducted recruitment exams is ongoing in Ranchi, Jharkhand—is alive and kicking.
On a wall at the protest site in Jantar Mantar, a poster printed in Hindi captured this angst succinctly. It read: “The modern system dangled a cookie before the commoner. If your child turns out to be good in studies, it could change the fate of the family. That one shred of hope has now been snatched away…”
The empirical evidence on returns on educational investments made by families depicts this economic insecurity. In 2023, over 39% of young graduates (less than 25 years of age) were unemployed, per the State of Working India 2026 Report published by the Azim Premji University. This number is worse than the 35% unemployment seen four decades back, in 1983.
The same report flags sliding returns over time: annual earnings growth for a male graduate (20–29 age group) between 2011 and 2017 was in the negative: -0.8% (-0.1% between 2017 and 2023), compared to a growth of 3.4% seen between 2004 and 2011, a period that coincided with the post-liberalisation economic boom and growth in IT services.
The student protests are an outcome of the extraordinary levels of desperation faced by millions of youngsters to get a fair shot at a stable, professional life, said Venu Madhav Govindu, who teaches at the premier Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru.
Besides, added Govindu, the state has ceded space to the private sector—making higher education extractive and unaffordable—and also failed to monitor the quality of education on offer. The mismatch between employment opportunities and the expansion of education sets most students up for failure and disappointment.
“The higher purpose of education, to enrich one’s mind and expand one’s horizons—that pathway is closed for all but an affluent minority,” Govindu said.
To be sure, it is not just students from middle- and low-income families who are stressed. Those who pay huge sums for a professional degree are also anxious. But they sound more confident of their ability to sail through the current crisis. Take, for instance, the readings of a computer science major from a top private university in the Delhi-National Capital Region. After spending ₹22 lakh on a B.Tech degree, he is interning at a startup; only about half of his batchmates are placed, most are in the starting salary range of ₹3–4 lakh per annum.
“Instead of taking up a low-paying and uncertain position I have decided to appear for the GATE entrance exam to pursue a master’s degree at a top-ranked institute. The only way to survive the AI ambush is via upskilling and learning what AI can’t do,” the student, who did not want to be named, said. The Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE) is an entrance exam for admission into technical postgraduate courses.
The student added that while course fees have shot up, starting salaries have remained stagnant for years. A student two years his senior had paid ₹16 lakh for the course while a student two years his junior is paying nearly ₹32 lakh for the same degree. “Were I younger by a few years, my family could not have afforded this degree,” he said, laughing.
A high-income parent from Bengaluru, spending nearly ₹45 lakh for a B.Tech degree for his elder son, said he is ready to spend on another course, likely an international management degree, to upskill his son. “The children of the super-rich will not wilt by the wayside,” declared the parent, who is a director at a bank headquartered in Europe.
‘Useless’ schools
As per the National Medical Council, India currently has 136,939 undergraduate medical seats on offer. Of these, there are more seats in private colleges (73,643) than in government institutes (63,296).
Experts contend that one way to deal with the rush of aspirants is to increase the number of seats in government colleges via higher budgetary allocations.
The challenge is, students admitted to new medical colleges have to deal with a shortage of faculty and lab facilities. Nearly 40% of medical students from both government and private colleges reported inadequate faculty strength, as per a 2025 survey by the Federation of All India Medical Associations. In addition, 37% of sanctioned teaching posts are lying vacant across the 20 existing AIIMS campuses, as per government numbers shared in Parliament. (The All India Institutes of Medical Sciences are India’s premier medical schools and funded by the Union government.)
Yet, there’s no denying that India has an unmet demand for doctors. The World Health Organization recommends one doctor per 1,000 people. Official numbers show that India has a doctor-patient ratio of 1:778, better than WHO’s recommended level, but only after including those practicing Ayurveda, homeopathy and other alternative systems of medicine.
Besides, there is an acute shortfall in some states and most rural and remote areas. For instance, Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, has fewer than one doctor for every 2,000 residents. Countries such as China and Brazil, with 3.1 and 2.4 physicians per 1,000 people, respectively, are well ahead of India (0.7), as per data from the World Health Organization.
A drawback of entrance exams is that they favour those who can afford private coaching, which means a student from a remote rural area studying in a government school, irrespective of merit, stands little or no chance, said Maheshwer Peri, educationist and chairman of Careers360, a counselling platform.
Peri added that the system may be transparent (favouring those with a higher score in entrance exams) but it is not fair or equitable. It admits students from high-income families who can pay ₹1 crore or more for a medical seat at a low cut-off of the 50th percentile. In other words, the private medical seats are ‘reservation’ for the rich. “This system also renders school education useless, which is its most damaging impact,” Peri warned.
The system forces a student to crack an entrance exam, while the focus in school is to impart conceptual clarity and understanding, said the high school physics teacher quoted earlier.
Both the teacher from Delhi and Peri spoke about the phenomenon of ‘dummy’ schools, where students enrol themselves to record attendance but attend classes only at coaching centres. Peri estimated that of the tens of thousands of students who live and prepare for the NEET exam in a hub like Kota, only about a quarter appear for the entrance exam from the city. Which means the rest are enrolled in dummy schools in other states.
“We need to rethink how to restore the importance of school education. This can be done by mandating a weight for board results (in addition to entrance exam scores) for admission to technical courses like medicine and engineering,” Peri said. In simple words: access to private coaching must not override the importance of schools on which most families, particularly the not-so-affluent, depend.
A check on aspirations
The world of Abhishek Kumar is far removed from that of Yash Vardhan from Delhi. Kumar, who belongs to a scheduled tribe, lives in Sasaram, a district town in rural, western Bihar. The second-youngest of a marginal farmer’s four children, his aspirations have been stifled by the economic situation of his family.
Kumar’s elder sister, Poonam, spent more than ₹2 lakh, living in Delhi’s Karol Bagh and preparing for the civil services exam, which qualifies one to be a top bureaucrat. Unable to make the cut, she returned to Sasaram last year, and now offers private tuitions to school students. The siblings live in town to prepare for entrance exams. Their parents live in a village 40 km away, tending to a small farm, where both rains and power supply are erratic.
The family cannot afford another round of expensive private coaching for Kumar after spending on their eldest daughter. Accordingly, Kumar has scaled down his aspirations. He is preparing for an entrance test for Group-B and Group-C level officers in the Central government (known as the Combined Graduate Level, or CGL exam). The online coaching fee is far lower, just around ₹1,000 per month, something the family can afford.
Last month, days before he turned 18, Kumar took the train from his hometown and reached Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to express solidarity with the protesting students. He slept on a footpath, made friends, and returned home after the protests were called off.
What next? “If I can’t make it through CGL, I will try for lower (officer) grades,” Kumar said. Those require only a high school certificate, and not the graduate college degree that Kumar has enrolled for.
Even in his wildest dreams, Kumar did not consider preparing for entrance exams for engineering or medical streams. “Those were never on my radar,” he said, because he understood early on that merit is a misnomer. Factors such as the economic status of the family one is born into, as well as social hierarchies and networks, play an outsized role in determining how far one can climb the economic ladder via education.
“About a third of our population still lives a precarious, hand to mouth existence. They have little access to economic resources and are routinely ignored by political formations. Living in desperate circumstances, they have to struggle to come to school and then to keep coming regularly. They fight against terrible odds to convert their talent and capacity into merit,” sociologist Amman Madan, who currently teaches at the Azim Premji University, wrote two decades back in an essay titled ‘Sociology of Merit’.
“How severe the odds are can be seen by the fact that the proportion of young people who are in the relevant age group and can actually make it up to the class XII examination is in the order of 15%. So when one looks at entrance exams to various vocational courses, it is important to realize that roughly 85% of India is not even getting the chance to apply, what to talk of living up to its fullest potential,” he added in his essay.
His words still hold true. More so, in an environment dominated by expensive private educational institutions, where a degree in liberal arts costs more than ₹20 lakh.
It may not be wrong to argue, wrote Madan, that “the biggest enemy of merit in India is inequality”.