Dronacharya to desi Ivy League aspirants

The US issued 2M more visas to Indian students last year than expected, hitting the highest overseas levels. With 30 per cent of fall admissions were from Tier 2 and 3 cities. India’s top education consultants talk battling plagiarism, rise of the non-metro star contender and personalised mentoring

Viral Doshi lives an analogue life. Even as he traverses continents to meet his diverse clientele, the experienced educational consultant prefers to operate without a website, social media presence—or even WhatsApp. His two decades in the profession have taught him that maintaining consistent, personal relationships with students face-to-face is crucial to them securing a promising future, and the success of his own endeavour. “Not to boast, but in the last few years, we’ve had more than 70 per cent Ivy League admits. Most of the students who approach us are those who aspire to study at the top universities,” Doshi says, without a hint of bragging in his voice.

He has been in the profession for 20 years and finds himself spending over an hour per session with his students. It’s an earnest effort to earn a young—often nervous and confused—person’s trust, with a commitment that’s almost parental. “I’m a big believer in treating each child like my own. That’s the only way you can become a successful consultant,” says the former manufacturing entrepreneur, who did his A levels in Britain and studied engineering at Cornell.

Whether it is veterans in the profession, like Doshi, or younger experts like Mumbai’s Alisha Mashruwala Daswani and Kolkata’s Kritika Bagaria, education consultants are an influential component in the foreign degree machinery in India. They help candidates write compelling personal essays, coach them to become ideal interviewees, and set them on a path of discipline that goes far beyond college. Sought by ambitious parents and students, they’re akin to a Dronacharya figure—teacher, mentor, life coach, all rolled into one.

In a telephonic interview between his meetings overseas, Doshi tells us that he doesn’t count the number of hours he works; to him, this is a calling. One of his earliest patrons was the journalist and political commentator, Fareed Zakaria. At this time, he was coaching his friends’ children informally, before he began Viral Doshi Associates in the early 2000s. Doshi is one among those consultants whose journey began as an acquaintance, uncle or older sister dispensing well-informed advice to a younger relative. Some stumble into the profession, others recognise and act on its vast potential in a country like ours.

Alisha Mashruwala Daswani says the demand for undergraduate programmes at foreign universities is growing in India. Pic/Anurag Ahire

The 21st century journey towards a degree abroad is reminiscent of stories from the homes of IIT-JEE aspirants. Many consultants become invested in students’ lives during high school itself, administering psychometric tests and analysing the young individuals’ interests and aptitude, to predict what career would suit them a decade later. “As much as we impact kids, we also impact their families. We work very closely with each parent,” says Kritika Bagaria, an ex-marketing and advertising professional who has six years of experience as a consultant. Q Manivannan, Head of Discover (an organisation that facilitates high-school and undergraduate research mentorship), says that the purview of this work can include siblings and school teachers too. Unsurprisingly, this attention to detail and focus means that most counsellors can only tend to a small cohort of candidates each year. Bagaria, for example, works with 70 families annually, while OnCourse Vantage, co-founded by Alisha Mashruwala Daswani, takes on a thousand students.

Exam scores, standard academic tests, extracurriculars, recommendations from faculty—the foreign university aspirant’s to-do list is a daunting one. Perhaps the most challenging criterion is writing the personal admissions essay—a document that gives colleges a glimpse into the student’s life and dreams, and indeed, the best versions of themselves. Since admissions directors read thousands of such essays, the pressure to write one that will make you stand out is immense.

Kritika Bagaria says her work has led to deep engagements with students, but also their parents

It’s no wonder then that consultants like Mridula Sood Maluste, who has over a decade of experience in the profession, spend days helping students perfect theirs. “A long time, as long as it takes—in the initial conversation, follow up conversations, iterations, more iterations, commentary and edits. Many drafts for just one essay. Why do we do this? Because through the layers, we are able to tease out a student’s most commendable and unique attributes and stories. We each have a splendid transformational story to tell, and at the end of the exercise, the student is able to offer a story worth telling, one, which, oftentimes, even the parent did not know they owned,” the ex-journalist explains. She and Doshi are co-authors of Indian Roots, Ivy Admits—a collection of personal essays, meant to serve as a guide, by those who made the cut. 

Such deep engagements with the students, prompting them to think more deeply about their personal lives, the challenges they have faced, the tragedies they braved, makes the consultants key catalysts in the students’ journey towards adulthood. Each consultant this writer spoke to recalled the effect that day-to-day, week-to-week training had on these candidates, some of whom have credited the consultants with helping them find purpose later in life. 

An Eklavya India Foundation class in session. The initiative imparts essential soft skills to aspirants from marginalised backgrounds

“I think another huge benefit is the realisation of self-worth; we come from a culture where criticism is rife and we are not taught, or encouraged, to appreciate ourselves; not just our achievements, but the winding path to those achievements; we help our students see that too,” Sood Maluste adds.

A particularly Indian problem is that of plagiarism in personal admission essays; in the context of institutions in the UK, it was found that the number of Indian students plagiarising personal statements has doubled over the last two years. India, followed by Nigeria, Romania and China, were the countries where the maximum flagged applications came from. Subsequently, the tendency to copy from research, Internet sources and fellow students’ work spills over into their academic work at university, after admission. This issue has much to do with the Indian education system and a lack of awareness on what amounts to plagiarism in the first place, but also the fear of failure.

Raju Kendre

It is also the reason many students seek out content agencies who provide pre-written essays to meet their profiles, for a price. “College admissions directors read thousands of essays, and they can easily make out if the essay is written by a student or a content agency. I can also tell the difference between the two, especially in those cases where the SAT scores are low or average, but the essay is outstanding,” says Doshi.

 “Apart from the indubitable moral question,” says Sood Maluste, “universities look for distinctive attributes and distinguishing factors, so how would a cookie cutter essay from an agency work? It would not! And if detected [more than likely], there will be consequences.” Recently, the use of ChatGPT has emerged as a problem—one that is evident and condemned unequivocally by the Mumbai-based consultant. “We insist that the student go back to the drawing board, and ‘purge’ the essay. So, we’re there, in part, as a moral compass,” she says.

Sood Maluste spends long periods of time working with students on their personal essays, to tease out the most interesting stories and attributes. Pic/Atul Kamble

The last decade has seen the entry of many new players. Doshi observes that established educationists are doing particularly well. “But it’s not a job for newcomers who think it’s a way of making quick money,” he asserts. Alisha Mashruwala Daswani says that the demand for a foreign education in the country is only going to grow in the next few years. “India is a bigger market for postgraduate programmes like MBAs, but the market size of undergraduate courses is also increasing. There’s certainly a lot of potential in the country, which is why you see so many consultants mushrooming.”

Bagaria speaks of the focus on top university admits for branding purposes and why those in the profession may need to look inwards. “My fellow consultants and I, who often collaborate and exchange ideas, discuss the vicious cycle—of stories of admission into prestigious colleges, and how such outcomes are glorified. In glorifying our services, are we taking attention away from the students themselves, who did all the work? Are we taking too much credit?” asks Kritika Bagaria.

Q Manivannan says the best firms in the business have hybrid models—paid ones for those who can afford consulting, and pro-bono assistance for those who cannot

She and her peers have also pondered over the idea of the ‘best fit’. A college like Stanford may not be ideal for every child; some individuals may not flourish there, but they’d do very well at a small, liberal arts college, Bagaria explains. “But fewer consultants are posting about admits into these smaller universities. We’re not helping the cause by mentioning only the Stanfords and Harvards of the world,” she adds.

Q Manivannan presents the unvarnished truth: Educational consulting can reflect the commercial priorities of the universities themselves. “Every application to a US or UK university costs money. This automatically means that only those who can afford to apply there—let alone afford to study there with near minimal funding—will choose to pursue admissions abroad. This means that students from specific demographics can be excluded,” says Manivannan, an award-winning writer who previously worked as a consultant.

Viral Doshi

The best firms, in Manivannan’s opinion, provide a suite of services that can cater to all motivated students from all backgrounds. “That makes effective counselling very demanding work—often 24x7, multidimensional, requiring advanced editorial skills, immense interpersonal experience, and tons of care and patience,” they say.

Is the story of the success of educational consultants in India, the story of country-wide social mobility and changing aspirations? “The change—rather the metamorphosis—over the last 10 years in India has been tremendous. Candidates are coming from places beyond Tier 3 cities. I’ve got clients who have got into the top universities, from Gorakhpur, Asansol, Vizag, Nanded and Pilibhit,” says Doshi, who attributes this change to growing prosperity beyond big cities and the emergence of more international board schools. “People’s aspirations for their children are evolving as they become more financially secure,” he explains.

Sood Maluste has had students from across the economic spectrum—the son of a police officer in Uttar Pradesh, of a mobile phone repairman in Matunga. “They all got admitted into Ivy League colleges and received aid,” she says.

Citing the example of an Amritsari girl who got into Harvard, Doshi explains that the gap that previously existed between the skillset of a student who grew up in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities and their more urban counterparts in Mumbai or Delhi, is no longer a reality. “They can speak the same English, they have the same knowledge, same level of articulation [as students in bigger cities]. But they also have more fire in their bellies, which I don’t see in urban kids,” he says.
 
Raju Kendre, a Chevening scholar and alumnus of the SOAS University of London, invokes Dr BR Ambedkar, who famously studied at Columbia University and the London School of Economics. “A century ago, our heroes like Babasaheb and Jaipal Singh Munda studied in foreign universities. They got global exposure and developed their critical thinking abilities. It gave them the drive to lead their communities towards progress. Education isn’t just about social mobility,” Kendre says.

A first-generation learner from a nomadic tribal farming community, Kendre began the Eklavya India Foundation to address the gaps he faced in his own education—as a young man who experienced language alienation in both Pune and the UK. Through its year-long Global Scholars programme, the six-year-old foundation equips students from the margins to access the information they need for a chance at a foreign degree. “I found that the proportion of students from marginalised communities in India who secure admission abroad is very small—though they form a large part of India’s population,” says Kendre.

About 400 mentors from fields like policy, STEM and media take applicants through the importance of recommendation letters and impart soft skill training, to help them get better at writing in English and giving presentations. “We focus on English skills and academic writing, because a lot of our mentees have been educated in local languages. It’s different from the rote learning that has been normalised,” he explains.

Kendre’s time in the UK taught him a great deal about the funding issues that marginalised students face. Unlike their privileged counterparts, these students’ families don’t own land or assets that could be used as a collateral in expensive education loans. “I got acceptance letters from 20 colleges—many of which are top-ranking institutes. But if it weren’t for a scholarship, I wouldn’t have been able to attend any of these programmes,” he rues. The Eklavya India Foundation corrects this by making students aware of international scholarships like the Fulbright, Chevening and Erasmus ones.

If a foreign university education—and the years of preparation for it—can broaden the horizons of a young person from Mumbai or Delhi, it can entirely transform the life of a student from the margins. This is what makes the work of the Foundation, and other initiatives like Project EduAccess, even
more significant.

269k
No. of Indian students who went to US universities in 2022-2023

70-1000
No. of students Indian consultants/agencies work with annually

13,24,954
No. of Indian students studying abroad, per Ministry of External Affairs data as of 2022

Ivy League Dreams

The Ivy League is a group of eight prestigious and private universities in the US, including names such as Harvard, Brown, Cornell and Columbia. These centuries-old institutions have enviable academic reputations, lists of illustrious alumni and state-of-the-art facilities, especially in sport and research. It is estimated that India sent approximately 2,69,000 students to colleges in the US in 2022-2023, with many takers for business, tech and science. A slim acceptance rate—3.4 per cent—doesn’t deter aspirants from vying for the Ivy League tag, which opens the doors to rich networking opportunities and premium jobs.

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