A majority of students who aspire to study abroad hail from Tier 2 and 3 cities, a pan-India study of 25,000 aspirational students by edtech start-up upGrad Abroad indicates.
“We are seeing rising interest from students hailing from cities like Thiruvananthapurm and Kottayam down south, Vadodara and Surat in the west, Lucknow in the north and so on when it comes to planning to study abroad,” said Ankur Nyati, president, Study Abroad at upGrad.
Around 57.2% of the 25,000 respondents who expressed interest in studying abroad hail from Tier 2 and 3 cities, as compared to 42.8% who belong to Tier 1 cities.
The study also indicates that the desire for ‘budget’ degrees is rising among the middle class, what with 41.1% of the respondents interviewed saying that they were unable to spend beyond ₹16 lakhs to ₹25 lakhs on studying abroad, as they had budget constraints. Another 13.4% said that their budget ranged from ₹ 6 lakhs to ₹15 lakhs, whereas another 40.4% said they had budget between ₹26 lakhs and ₹50 lakhs.
Departing from the popular notion that the aspirants were from international IB schools, 56% of respondents who expressed interest in studying abroad were from State boards, followed by 32% in CBSE and 12% students from ICSE, the study says.
Popular destinations
Annually nearly six to seven lakh Indian students go to study abroad. Germany and France are emerging as popular destinations among engineering and management students, especially with lower annual tuition and living costs as compared to more expensive destinations such as Australia, Canada and the U.K.
“A student would spend anywhere close to ₹20 lakh in tuition and living costs in Germany and France as compared to nearly ₹30 lakh in Australia,” Mr. Nyati added.
While currently there are nearly 10,000 Indian students studying in France, President Emmanuel Macron on his recent visit to India said that France was looking forward to issuing as many as 30,000 student visas annually, a three-fold jump.
Many hurdles
Meanwhile, higher living costs, a large housing crises, decline in rate of jobs in Canada and revamped Australian structure with a negligible tolerance for gap years, higher English proficiency for certain degrees are making these countries less favourable with students.
Around 66.5% respondents said that they preferred to seek an education loan to meet their requirements. About 64% of them said that they preferred non-collateral loans. In FY22, according to data shared by Ministry of Finance in Lok Sabha, India public sector banks disbursed ₹7,576.02 crore worth in loans, which is close to 90% of the total education loans in the country.
Interestingly, 34.4% aspirants who want to study abroad are in age group of 26 to 30 years and already have nearly six years of work experience before applying for their master’s degree, the study noted.
About 55.6% of the respondents were keen on pursuing an MBA which opens doors to managerial roles, while the second-largest group (28.7%) expressed interest in Computer Science and Information Technology, including Data Science and Artificial Intelligence courses.