The high price of getting into college in India

NEW DELHI – Student protests that rocked India in July are shining a light on the country’s private coaching industry and its soaring costs.After-school tuition is sucking up a bigger portion of Indian family budgets these days as an increasing number of students compete for a limited number of spots at top colleges.That’s why when examination papers for entrance to medical schools were leaked in May, and the government forced more than two million students to resit the test, anger exploded onto the streets.The protests by tens of thousands of students in July in New Delhi and other major cities culminated in the education minister resigning over the scandal and Prime Minister Narendra Modi appointing a task force to tackle the problem of leaked papers. Still, India’s opposition has stepped up pressure on Modi’s government, with Congress leader Rahul Gandhi demanding Home Minister Amit Shah’s resignation for the crackdown on students on July 20. The issue has disrupted Parliament and united opposition parties, while protest leader Abhijeet Dipke also accused Shah of being responsible for the police action, Press Trust of India reported on July 30.Here’s a look at the drivers of education costs in India and how that’s fuelling the frustrations of young people. Education costs are rising faster than incomesHousehold incomes have increased at a compound rate of 11.9 per cent a year in the past decade, trailing the 15.7 per cent pace in education spending, according to the Consumer Pyramids Household Survey by private data provider Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy (CMIE). An average household in India now spends almost 3 per cent of their income on education, at least a decade high, compared with 1.95 per cent in 2014-15, according to CMIE. Private tuition was among the fastest-growing components of households’ education budget, increasing an average of 16.7 per cent a year, while school and college fees rose 14 per cent. Spending on books grew even faster, at 17.5 per cent a year.For many families, the payoff is the chance to secure a place at an affordable government college. A five-year medical degree at a government college can cost as little as 50,000 rupees (S$671). At some private colleges, the bill would be a minimum of five million rupees.Competition for seats at top colleges is fierceMedical and engineering degrees are highly sought after in a country where quality jobs are scarce.For the medical entrance exam that was cancelled in 2026 – known as the National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test, or NEET – nearly 2.3 million students took the test, competing for about 140,000 undergraduate medical school seats nationwide.Fewer than 10,000 of those are at the country’s top 50 medical colleges.The competition is also fierce for engineering colleges that produced global technology leaders such as Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai and International Business Machines’s Arvind Krishna.Registrations for the Joint Entrance Examination, the gateway to many of those institutions, climbed to about 1.6 million in 2026, although India’s top 100 engineering schools offer only about 134,000 first-year posts.Private tutoring services are boomingTo get into top schools, parents are paying more and more for private coaching, a largely unregulated industry for which there’s little official data.The central government introduced guidelines in January 2024 to regulate the sector after reports of institutes charging exorbitant fees, making misleading claims and other malpractices. However, with school education largely under the jurisdiction of state governments, the Ministry of Education says its ability to regulate coaching institutes is limited.About 38 per cent of secondary-school students were enrolled in private tutoring in 2025, up from 30 per cent in 2018, according to results of the government’s sample surveys on education.Tuition costs are soaringIn 2025, families spent an average of 16 per cent of their child’s total education budget on private coaching, up from 12.5 per cent in 2018. In rural areas, the financial burden is even higher.The proportion of spending dedicated to private coaching climbs as students reach higher grade levels. Families with children in higher secondary school spent nearly a quarter of their education budget on private coaching in 2025, up from 18 per cent in 2018.The government is spending less of its budget on educationThe coaching boom has coincided with a declining share of the government’s budget being devoted to education.Although allocations to the Ministry of Education have risen in nominal terms, they have fallen as a share of total government spending over the past decade. The ministry received about 1.39 trillion rupees in the 2026-27 budget, or roughly 2.6 per cent of total expenditure.Education spending is shared between the federal and state governments, making the ministry’s allocation only one part of overall public investment in the sector. BLOOMBERG