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Young Indians say 'no thanks' to American dream
(Agencies)
Updated: 2009-03-26 10:16 The GRE, or Graduate Record Examination, is the standard admission test for graduate university studies in the United States and several other English-speaking countries. Garvit Bafna in Pune, a city near India's financial capital Mumbai, took the exam, but he says he will only move to America if he gets into a top-ranked university. Even students who have passed the GRE exam are abandoning plans to study abroad due to lack of funds, said Rajiv Ganjoo, head of international education at Career Launcher, an educational service provider in India.
"It is a waiting game now," Ganjoo said. "Students are looking at the recession, at how the colleges react to it and how the government reacts to it, before taking any steps." For students already in the United States, getting fellowships and other funding is becoming difficult, especially for foreigners as the pool of scholarship dollars has dried up due to shrinking university endowments from stock market losses. "The funding scenario is grim as compared to past years," said Cherry Harika, a 24-year-old from India's Punjab province who is studying for a masters degree at Boston University. "My university has frozen new hiring. There are hardly any new job openings for foreigners, especially when US citizens are losing their jobs." Employer visa sponsorships are growing scarcer and President Barack Obama's administration is under pressure to restrict the number of temporary work permits issued to foreigners. About 55,000 students in India took the GRE last year, down more than 20 percent from the year before, said Jaideep Chowdhary, who heads the GRE program at a private training institute in India. Most students who study in the United States need to shell out around $50,000 for a two-year stay, he said. Much of that money would come from loans which are not easy to get these days due to the credit crunch, especially for students with no reasonable assurance of a job. By contrast, studying at the Indian Institutes of Technology in Madras, part of a highly reputed nationwide network of engineering and technology campuses, costs about $1,200 a year. India too has taken a hit from the financial crisis which has slowed the scorching pace of growth of its IT outsourcing sector. One small advantage of the crisis for India may be the human capital benefits as the brightest stay home, said Wadhwa, who wrote a report titled "America's loss is the world's gain." "This is an economic tragedy that significantly increases the chances the next Intel or Cisco Systems will launch outside the US," Wadhwa wrote.
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