A few years ago, integrated programmes created a big boom in the education market across major cities. The practice of students fully concentrating on ‘coaching’ with no attendance in college was adopted by several coaching institutes with tie-ups with schools and junior colleges.
With the Education department announcing that it will ban integrated coaching, coaching giants are setting up colleges to ensure ‘synchronisation’ between college and coaching institutes.
With the promise of good infrastructure, quality teaching and excellent results, coaching institutes-turned-colleges are a big hit. Students cough up anywhere between Rs two to six lakh for two years to prepare for professional courses such as engineering and medicine.
Parents throng coaching institutes that either have their own college or a formal/informal ‘tie-up’ with a college.
Coaching giant PACE, runs seven Pace ‘junior’ colleges across Mumbai. The official website of the college says it came into existence to solve the issue of poor synchronisation between colleges it collaborated with.
“Though through Synchronized Program time and effort of the child was saved, there were hassles such as the attitude of college teachers and intentional de-synchronisation of syllabus. In order to rectify this problem, PACE came up with its own Junior Science Colleges.” Today, the institute proudly mentions that it has the ‘highest cut-off in first year junior college admissions’.
This year, Kota coaching giant Rao IIT formally opened five colleges in the city, with close to 200 students in each. Vinay Kumar, MD of Rao IIT said that coaching and college will be separate elements. “Students in our college will benefit from state-of-art facilities and be taught the state board syllabus. Coaching centres separately train students for competitive exams,” he said.
Sinhal classes, another leading name in the coaching sector, has 14 integrated junior colleges. Sudhanshu Sinhal, MD of the institute, says these colleges are only ‘proposed’. He said that the reason why most students are pulled towards coaching classes are add-on exams such as JEE, NEET and CET for which colleges cannot train students. “Forty per cent of students want to concentrate on studying for such exams but they don’t get the necessary coaching in colleges as colleges are meant to train for the state board,” he said.
Alpana Bhobe, principal of Bhavani Shankar Road college of Science, run by Vidyalankar Classes in Dadar, said that despite the association, there is no tie-up. “The college only teaches the state board syllabus.”
Narendra Bambwani, former vice-president of the Maharashtra Class Owners Association (MCOA) said that allowing coaching institutes to set up colleges is like legalising integrated models of teaching. “With their own colleges getting permissions, classes would train students for competitive exams, that too at exorbitant costs,” he said. “What will the difference be between coaching classes and colleges then?” Bambwani said that while big coaching institutes are adopting this model to make their way in, the mid and small scale ones are still running tie-ups informally with colleges. “There are at least 16-20 full fledged tie ups at this point in the city, but the government has not taken any action against them,” he added.
