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  • Rejected in India, Students Turn to US Universities.

    New Delhi: Moulshri Mohan was an excellent student at one of the top private high schools in New Delhi. When she applied to colleges, she received scholarship offers of $20,000 from Dartmouth and $15,000 from Smith. Her pile of acceptance letters would have made any ambitious teenager smile: Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Duke, Wesleyan, Barnard and the University of Virginia.

    But because of her 93.5 percent cumulative score on her final high school examinations, which are the sole criteria for admission to most colleges here, Ms. Mohan was rejected by the top colleges at Delhi University.

    “Daughter now enrolled at Dartmouth!” her mother, Madhavi Chandra, wrote, updating her Facebook page. “Strange swings this admission season has shown us. Can’t get into DU, can make it to the Ivies.”

    Ms. Mohan, 18, is now one of a surging number of Indian students attending American colleges and universities, as competition in India has grown formidable, even for the best students. With about half of India’s 1.2 billion people under the age of 25, and with the ranks of the middle class swelling, the country’s handfuls of highly selective universities are overwhelmed.

    Another student, Ms. Sachdeva, 19, graduated from Delhi Public School in 2010, with a 94.5 percent exam score, was rejected at St. Stephen’s, one of the top colleges at Delhi University due to high cutoff marks. She decided to take a year off and work as an intern at a nonprofit group affiliated with the World Health Organization, while applying to American universities. But for some students, it is not merely the competition that drives them to apply to study in the United States. It is also the greater intellectual freedom of an American liberal arts education. “If somebody majors in English here, it’s like, ‘O.K., she’ll get married,’ ” said Ms. Sachdeva, who is attending the University of Chicago this fall and is planning to major in economics with a minor in creative writing.

    This summer, Delhi University issued cutoff scores at its top colleges that reached a near-impossible 100 percent in some cases. The Indian Institutes of Technology, which are spread across the country, have an acceptance rate of less than 2 percent ? and that is only from a pool of roughly 500,000 who qualify to take the entrance exam, a feat that requires two years of specialized coaching after school.

    “The problem is clear,” said Kapil Sibal, the government minister overseeing education in India, who studied law at Harvard. “There is a demand and supply issue. You don’t have enough quality institutions, and there are enough quality young people who want to go to only quality institutions.”

    American universities and colleges have been more than happy to pick up the slack. Faced with shrinking returns from endowment funds, a decline in the number of high school graduates in the United States and growing economic hardship among American families, they have stepped up their efforts to woo Indian students thousands of miles away.

    Representatives from many of the Ivy League institutions have begun making trips to India to recruit students and explore partnerships with Indian schools. Some have set up offices in India, partly aimed at attracting a wider base of students. The State Department held a United States-India higher education summit meeting on Thursday at Georgetown University to promote the partnership between the countries.

    Indians are now the second-largest foreign student population in America, after the Chinese, with almost 105,000 students in the United States in the 2009-10 academic year, the last for which comprehensive figures were available. Student visa applications from India increased 20 percent in the past year, according to the American Embassy.

    Now, not only wealthy Indian families send their children to the best American schools but the idea is beginning to spread to middle-class families, for whom Delhi University has always been the best option. THE NEW YORK TIMES

  • No Indian university makes it to world’s top 200.

    London : Not a single Indian university, not even the celebrated IITs and IIMs figure in the latest ranking of the world’s top 200 universities, with American varsities dominating the list.

    US institutions have grabbed seven spots in the top 10 despite President Barack Obama warning American students of stiff competition from pupils in India and China.

    Three British universities, Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial College London, continue to make the cut with a university in China also making the grade.

    The world rankings produced by the Times Higher Education magazine, places 75 US universities in the top 200.

    UK has 32 universities in the list, followed by Germany (12), the Netherlands (12) and Canada (9).

    The list of top 200 includes universities in Taiwan, Brazil, Singapore, South Africa and China, but this year repeats earlier trends about India. No Indian university is deemed good enough to be included in the elite list, inspite of India claiming to have substantially increased its spending on higher education in recent years.

    The top 10 in the list of 200 universities are: California Institute of Technology, Harvard University, Stanford University, University of Oxford, Princeton University, University of Cambridge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Imperial College London, University of Chicago and the University of California, Berkeley.

    Britain’s Universities Minister David Willetts said the list showed that relative to its size, the UK’s university system was the “world’s best-performing”.

    California Institute of Technology, better known as Caltech, is a relatively small institution, with about 2,000 mostly graduate students and almost 500 staff.

    “With as many as seven million students predicted to be studying outside their home country within the next few years, and with international research collaboration at the top of government agendas, these world university rankings are more important than ever,” said Ann Mroz, editor of Times Higher Education.

    Paul Marshall, executive director of the 1994 Group of UK universities, highlighted funding worries.

    He said, “UK universities are facing budget cuts, despite the new fee regime. The sweeping reductions to capital grants will make it harder to invest in the facilities that make our universities world leaders.”

    Oxford vice-chancellor Andrew Hamilton has also warned that a lack of funding meant that the UK’s universities would struggle to compete for the best research students in the “global market for talent.”

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