The price students pay for a prized IIT seat

"Like a 23-year-old machine learning engineer based out of Florida, who started his JEE preparation as early as Class 8, because his peers had started as early as Class 6. The engineer says he was so engrossed in his prep that he ignored basics such as good hygiene, good grooming, or even making friends."

Wow, this is insane. For all the kids in the world who are doing this sort of thing, JEE or Gaokao style 1-in-100 pass rate, keep some things in mind:

- When you're older, you will appreciate your school friends more than any others. They're the only people whose parents have fed you. You know their life stories. You're each other's support network. Today, my friend from school lost his dad. I drove right over. We phoned another classmate who had the same thing happen to him the week before. I don't know what people do if they don't have these kinds of relationships.

- Very few people will pass, but everyone can learn the material. You can learn the material (Machine Learning, civil engineering, linear algebra, etc) to a high standard, and still forgetting one little thing will make you not be top 1%. We can't all be top, but CAN all understand the knowledge that people before us have discovered.

- When you leave university, there are no more exams. If you optimize your whole life towards passing exams, you will suddenly come to a point where somehow you will be judged on things other than finite, concisely answerable questions. Both open ended questions like "how should we design this system" and more vague ones like "how do we all work together".

- To even have a chance of passing a 1% bar, you need a fair bit of privilege. You're likely to have come from a better off, stable family. You also need some luck at that level. The simple fact of the examiner deciding to include a topic that is fresh in your mind could be the difference between passing and failing.

- You're not actually learning things when you study for an exam of this high a bar. You're memorizing tables, because if you don't happen to have that trigonometric identity in your head, you won't pick up that marginal point. Or you memorize constants that in any real life situation would be a lookup in a book. Or you memorize proofs so that you don't have to spend valuable exam time actually thinking.

- Even after you pass through the eye of the needle, you will not feel that special. I went to a top, world-famous uni, and people were mostly ordinary. I'd say half of my higher level math and physics classmates from high school would have done just fine. I didn't think there were many especially smart people there, maybe a few reasonably hard workers. But none of the John Nash in A Beautiful Mind kind of striking genius.

- It's turtles all the way down. What's natural after you pass this exam is that certain businesses will present their hiring pipeline as the next step. Don't buy their crap. There's just more and more filters, and the ones in the corporate ladder are brutal. There's no official exam result, and very few places in the next round of musical chairs. Someone is bound to pass every single hurdle, but it won't be you.

- This style of exam belongs in math contests. I used to enjoy those in high school, and framing it as an extracuricular allows the people who don't want to compete to opt out. It's totally fair to have a high bar in a math contest, and it's totally fair to ask unintuitive questions like that IMO question with the windmill. In the end it's a bit of extra exercise for the brain with low cost of failure. You don't have to feel bad if you get a math contest question wrong.

Finally, I think the real problem is that India is a huge country that really ought to have more spaces. If you're at a point where over 100 kids are competing for one space, you can add some spaces and get more engineers out, without compromising quality. Making extra lessons for people to pass doesn't increase the number of spaces, the majority of the effort of crawling over your cohort is wasted.

I don’t know what you consider academics but I went to a university in your list and they definitely had plenty of things other than what I’d consider academics to select on. Firstly they had basic biographical information (eg your name, which school you went to, I think your age). Secondly they had interviews where they could use whatever impression they liked. Thirdly they had discretion in the offer they made to you (ie “we’ll give you a place if you get these grades”) and discretion in which of the students not meeting their offers they chose to accept (“you didn’t meet your offer but we deliberately give out too many too-difficult offers and we’ve decided we prefer you out of the candidates who didn’t make it”).

Obviously the people involved in the process were generally ethically minded but if this thread shows anything, it’s that two people may do quite different things while each trying to act ethically.

Prosperity IMHO means a growth in per-capita wealth. On the other hands, "the elites" may prefer a growth in total wealth (since part of that growth accumulates to them) through a population increase even if it comes at the cost of decrease in per-capita wealth for the actual society.

tl;dr - the writer passes of systemic flaws as those peculiar to one elite institution in search of clickbait without presenting (non-existent) alternatives.

This is what happens when a reporter at a online publication of a quality between Buzzfeed and Slate writes a clickbait article on why an apex institution is destroying youth. Admission to the IITs is widely considered in India to writing a golden ticket in life. They can study abroad at virtually any university, get hired by multinationals in India or abroad etc. etc.

The points the reporter makes might be factually correct but are misguided and erroneous. This is not like students who don't study for the IITs get a more holistic education. Ask what exactly would the kids do if not study for the IITs? Workout, train physically, work with their hands on vocational skills? All these are either absent in Indian society or looked down upon.

The whole Indian system by virtue of demand >> supply due to 70 years of socialism/quais-communism is about state monopoly on education. Indian spend 10s of billions of dollars sending their children abroad for undergraduate and masters education because supply is so meagre. If your family is not wealthy then this is the only guaranteed way out, rather used to be, as things are slowly changing.

Hate to say this but there is also an element of sour grapes to the writer's lament - IIT graduates command social prestige, job opportunities and mating opportunities.

Now go write about how kids in the US work so hard to pass BUDS spend all their lives perfecting their physical endurance in detriment to their mind. Or the football players who devote all their energies to get noticed by college scouts. IIT's are no different just in a different realm. I would almost argue that the IIT exams are superior as they are atleast not damaging their body and wasting prime years of their lives not developing their minds.

"Pretty good" compared to what? Top 15% of how many for how many spots?