Squeezed Out in India, Students Turn to U.S.:
“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.”
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The financial strain is considerable. Some middle-class salaries in India are below the poverty line in the West. The difference in tuition between top American and Indian universities is staggering. Tuition at Dartmouth is $41,736 a year, not including room and board, while most of the colleges of Delhi University cost about $150 to $500 per year.
The supply-demand issue must have something to do with the fact that there’s no way that the Indian government would be able to subsidize too many students. So they have to choke the supply of students to align it with the supply of education. Second, such cheap costs (even if it neglects non-trivial incidentals) look to be shifting resources from the broader tax base to the small minority (though it may be that most Indians don’t pay much into taxes, I don’t know).