Kota, Rajasthan - India's cram school Capital

While driving back from work yesterday I was listening to Mitch Albom at WJR760AM talk about a Wall Street Journal article on Cram Schools in Kota, Rajasthan.

The article talks about 16 year old Rohit Agarwal who quit his high school in the northeast corner of India in June. With two suitcases and a shoulder bag Rohit took a two-hour flight and a six-hour train ride to Kota, India's cram-school capital. Why did he do that? Rohit's plan was to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools in Kota where approximately 40,000 students show up every year. The intensive programs in these coaching schools, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams. In Kota, most of the schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

Quoting the Wall Street article

The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota's cramming regimen.

"If we stayed at home, we just wouldn't be able to study enough," says Mr. Agarwal as he takes a break from lessons. "If you don't study hard, you won't get admission."

Rohit starts studying at 7 a.m., works on practice problems until noon. After lunch, he goes to class, where he gets the answers to the problems, gets home around 8 p.m. and does homework until midnight.

Kota has become a cram-industry boom town as more Indians seek to send their children to college and economic expansion has far outstripped the increase in college placements, making the competition fiercer.

Students study full-time for two years just for one entrance exam, mostly for the IITs but also for other universities and colleges. The rigor has become part of its selling point: As Kota's reputation for success has spread, more young hopefuls have flocked to the city