I Learned More in School Than in College—Why That Matters for India

This is a personal account, not a research note; I will draw on my journey as a student and as an educator, rather than on statistics.

My post-secondary education was long—engineering, an MBA, and a Ph.D. And yet, where did I learn the most?

During my years in school. I should qualify that, though: I attended four good private schools in three cities. My experience, therefore, was hardly typical of the Indian student.

Yet that qualification is exactly why I’m convinced of how much quality school education matters.

Most of what I draw on in my daily life comes from school. The three Rs—reading, writing, and arithmetic—have served me more than almost anything else I learned afterward, and those skills only compound with time. Even my doctoral studies, at the core, improved my ability to read, write, and think.

That is not to say higher education added nothing — it built on what I had and opened specific doors. But the greater relative value, to me, lay in school education.

At the national level, the case is sharper still: the public resources spent on my engineering and business education likely generated a far smaller social return than they would have if directed toward school education.

That India got the order backward — building up higher education while leaving schooling thin — has been said for decades. I’m adding one life that ran through the system, and it has led me to hold that view deeply.

A Personal Qualification

Accessible and affordable higher education enabled my father to build a better life, and I received a high-quality private school education as a result. Without that access, my path might have been far less fortunate, at first glance.

However, a nation with a broader, stronger educational base would likely have opened opportunities for me too. A different ordering of priorities might have lifted many more people, without closing pathways for people like me.

Building Before the Foundation

At independence, India faced an enormous educational challenge: limited resources, widespread poverty, mass illiteracy.

Those who stood to gain the most from education were the poor, particularly in rural India — and consequently, the country had the most to gain from their empowerment.

India needed to make universal, quality school education its top educational priority. Instead, it devoted considerable attention and scarce resources to higher education.

This wasn’t entirely a new direction. Britain left India with a higher-education system more developed than its school system—colleges and universities that served the colonial administration.

Independent India could have reordered those priorities. Instead, it largely built upon the structure it had inherited.

There was some logic to this. A newly sovereign country needed professionals to build a modern economy, and the government invested accordingly.

Some of that same higher-education capacity was also needed to train school teachers, so the two investments were never entirely separate.

But the relative emphasis was wrong, and it has proven costly and difficult to reverse.

It was like constructing a multi-story building while paying insufficient attention to its foundation.

Beyond a narrow tier of the well-resourced schools, typically urban and private, school quality drops sharply, leaving millions of children in classrooms that fail to provide the basic education they need to thrive.

Ironically, India’s emphasis on higher education was meant to help build a modern nation. Instead, because the base remained weak, it helped entrench the divide between the two Indias.

The Allocation of Money

India spends the bulk of its education budget on schools, simply because the system is so large. India never made excellence in school education the kind of national institutional priority it made higher education.

And even the money that reaches schools often doesn’t translate into learning as much as it should; weak accountability, inconsistent teachers, and poor assessment get in the way.

Why the Course Was Never Corrected

Since the mid-1960s, initiatives and policies have aimed to improve school education and expand access.

However, recognizing an issue is not the same as making it the overriding priority.

For decades, as India expanded its higher-education system, it acquired an institutional momentum of its own that is now difficult to rein in.

In resource-constrained India, any government that tried to reallocate resources from higher education to school education would face immense resistance from India’s vast and deeply entrenched higher-education establishment — especially from a middle class that sees heavily subsidized higher education as an entitlement.

The political costs would be immediate, but the payoffs would come only in the long run.

By contrast, opening a new university, announcing a new IIT, or expanding a medical college yields tangible and photogenic political capital today.

Still, there are glimmers of hope: in recent years, school education has received more focused attention in pockets. I have seen this in Delhi, through occasional tutoring of the children of a woman who works in our home. I was heartened to learn about their course content, teacher involvement, and parent-teacher meetings.

It’s one data point, not a trend, but it suggests what’s possible. Unfortunately, it is still not the central organizing priority nationwide.

I hope the NEET issue, at least, will make more of us look beyond the upper floors and ask whether we are finally willing to fix the foundation.

In Part 2, I’ll examine whether the returns from higher education justified the priority it received.