Branding matters for Indian students and a lot of universities don’t recognise this

The PIE: Is there a move away from studying IT and MBA focused degrees?

HS: The typical premise growing up in India is engineering, MBA, maybe law and the sciences. My premise is if you have 1.2 billion people not everyone is going to be a lawyer or doctor – you need a diversity of careers. So we aim to cover anything and everything from Archaeology to Zoology. We profiled a medical illustrator for example and we got so many responses from people in the medical world who said it’s so hard to explain to students that jobs like this exist. Another one was a Master Sommelier – basically wine tasting- and we got loads of responses. We also did a story on doctor who became a musician – all of these things spike our traffic. Parents will only tell kids what they want to do, but today it’s a different world.

The PIE: What is driving outbound students?

Only 15% of India’s population is online, that’s a 150 million people. In the next 10 years it will be half a billion

HS: India hasn’t done a great job of marketing itself. The biggest challenge is capacity. We haven’t expanded it in the last decade. At the macro level it looks like it’s expanding – with 600 universities- but at every level there is a huge shortage of faculty. For example, one of the top universities in India is Delhi. The system of entry is based on the board exams students take in grade 12, but the cut off mark is 100%. 1% of students get in. The New York Times recently did a story about this one kid who got 95% on the exam, went on a scholarship to Dartmouth but was rejected by Delhi University.

The PIE: What do you think is going to happen in the sector over the next five years?

HS: The big changes will be more undergraduate students going out of India. It’s currently split 70% graduate and 30% undergraduate. That will become 50/50 in the next five years. Today in India, only 15% of India’s population is online, that’s a 150 million people. In the next 10 years it will be half a billion, which is phenomenal growth.

We get 6 million hits per year and our site and that will grow exponentially. That hit rate is growing at 30%. India is where the US was before the dot com era in 1996 and 1997.