The National Eligibility Cum Entrance Test (NEET) has spurred the growth of hundreds of coaching centres in India, which has further helped affluent students to clear the medical entrance test, leaving aspirants from underprivileged sections behind, says the Justice AK Rajan Committee which studied the impact of NEET from the socially disadvantaged sections in medical admissions in Tamil Nadu.. Since its introduction in 2016, over 400 NEET Coaching Centres have mushroomed in Tamil Nadu, according to the report, which was made public on Monday, September 20. The total business of these coaching firms in the state is approximately ₹5750 crore, exclusively incurred on NEET, the report highlights.
A section of the committee report highlights the exorbitant fees charged by the 400+ coaching centres. The committee studied the fee structures of the major coaching centres in Tamil Nadu for various coaching periods (short and long).
“The range of one month crash course fee (in these centres) is Rs.10,000-Rs.38,000, for one year it is 30,000-Rs.1,50,000 and for four years (long term) it is 2,50,000-4,50,000,” the report highlights. Factoring in the number of candidates who have repeated, the average cost of coaching a student is Rs 95,033. By charging such amounts, a coaching centre on average makes Rs 13.95 crore annually, the report says. “This trend shows the financial muscle power of the affluent segment that succeeded in getting medical seats after the invention of NEET,” it says.
By comparing the annual incomes of parents of NEET aspirants and the fee structures of coaching centres, the report has found out that 95% of the Tamil Nadu State Board of Secondary Education (TNSBE) students cannot afford to go for NEET coaching.
Between the pre-NEET and post-NEET periods, the rate of the applicants of the TNBSE students has radically decreased from approximately 95% in pre-NEET period to 64.27% in 2020-21 as opposed to an exponential increase in the surging applicants of CBSE (from an average of 3.17% in pre-NEET to 32.26% in 2020-21). This shows that the percentage of the TNBSE students applying for admission in MBBS fell down by approximately 30% but that of the CBSE students increased by 31%, the report adds.
With medical admissions, the report shows that the post-NEET era further disadvantaged State Board Students when it came to clearing the medical entrance test.
The above table shows data of medical admissions based on board of education (CBSE, State Board, Other) from 2010 till 2021. It shows that post 2016, when NEET was introduced, the number of CBSE students who secured medical admissions to MBBS programmes far exceeded the number from the pre-NEET years.
The report also found that NEET and the coaching class eco-system further pushed away students from rural areas. The table below shows that post 2017, the percentage of students from rural areas securing MBBS admissions marginally declined as compared to numbers from the Pre-NEET years.
Entrance tests like NEET which already disadvantages first generation, rural and underprivileged students further forces students to depend on coaching classes to crack the exam.
The report highlights that in the year 2019-2020, 99% of students who wrote the exam had received coaching before they appeared for NEET. “Most of them had repeatedly taken the examination to get admission to MBBS. Many of them are being coached from 8th standard onwards, mentally preparing the students to concentrate on the NEET Examination without giving much importance to the actual learning in their studies,” the report says.
In 2020-2021, the percentage of repeaters who have secured medical college admissions in MBBS programmes rose to 71.42% from a meagre 12.47% in 2016-2017, according to the report. These repeaters, the report states, stay un-enrolled for higher education after class 12, “only to be coached by the corporate and school based coaching factories for the subsequent few years until they clear NEET”.
“This clearly indicates that medical education has treaded rapidly, just in a couple of years of its inception, into the hands of those affluent segments of the society who can afford to pay such a sizable fees for coaching; be it school based or corporate based, the report adds. Thus, coaching-dependent entrance tests such as NEET will only help the ‘haves’ against the ‘have nots’ and those with financial strength who can access these classes.
The report states that coaching centers make students “marks scoring machines”, discouraging learning. “The prospective medical aspirants do not get opportunity to acquire all round skills, as aforesaid, including cognitive, reasoning, creative, social and behavioural skills, that are very much essential prior to enter medical studies…Whereas, the culture of coaching and commercialisation caused by the single-criteria admission based on the NEET score would not encourage either the educators to impart a holistic education or the medical aspirants to work towards acquiring,” it states.
Watch the interview with Justice AK Rajan who headed the committe to study the impact of NEET on marginalised students in TN