STEM jobs for the most disadvantaged
Can poor rural youth crack high tech jobs in global companies?
Yes! The Avanti Fellows Program shows how
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For a young person from a poor, rural area located far from urban centers, this can be an impossible dream. No one from “here” has been able to do this before…. Therefore, it cannot be done, goes the thinking.
And yet… buried in young hearts is also the feeling that they have a right to more than the reinforced disadvantages that come their way from their “assigned place” in India’s hierarchical social-economic system.
In my interview with Akshay Saxena, co-founder of Avanti Fellows, he described this youthful sentiment, and the accompanying hunger to learn, as “incredible”.
In recognition of Avanti’s fifteen-year-long experiment in STEM education for these overlooked young people in India, Saxena received the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship’s award for social impact at the World Economic Forum earlier this year.
With fellow IIT-Bombay graduate Krishna Ramkumar, they asked: What is stopping this young cohort from cracking the code to one of the world’s most difficult college entrance examination? That is, the Joint Entrance Exam (JEE) to enter the ranks of top-tier Indian and National institutes of technology (IITs and NITs).
The obvious answer— entrenched poverty.
Members of this cohort could not buy access into the elite coaching camps that prepared young adults of the middle and upper urban classes to make their way through the JEE. Not those who had persevered to stay in school against pressures to work the field or tend to the home; not even those who showed academic promise.
In an experimental mode, the Avanti Team used their personal experiences of being coached, of cracking the JEE, and of successfully graduating from various demanding undergraduate STEM programs— to design a free advanced program to prepare students from this cohort to break through the JEE barrier.
Sensitive to varying individual abilities to cope with high pressure, as well as to the mental health effects of possible failure for young students who struggle to perform at grade level, or whose talents lie in non-STEM areas, the Avanti program sought to partner with rural public schools whose students were selected from those who performed strongly on a competitive science-based test. Thus identified, these “high capacity” students were invited to live and study at the government-run rural boarding schools. This was the talent cohort from disadvantaged areas that Avanti chose to focus on.
Avanti programs are delivered online (the students borrow cell phones, or use computers provided by government subsidies or through Avanti support)— under the supervision of a teacher-mentor who is hired and trained (much like a graduate student teaching assistant might do in an American university) to invert the traditional learning model by leading students to solve practice test problems and worksheets on their own.
Two main innovations need highlighting
The first is a pedagogical format that insists on intellectual capacity-building by problem-solving and intensive practice, instead of the sterile rote and repetition method, which is the norm in India. It is encouraging that the students have done rather well with this model—adapting to it under the guidance of their supervising teacher.
The second innovation --one that Saxena believes to be more crucial-- is that Avanti Fellows solves a persistent systems-problem by identifying the most talented among the most disadvantaged. By getting them together in one place—and then using technology to guide them through state-of-the-art classes in test prep—significant numbers are able to crack the glass ceiling and enter top-tier technical institutes in the country.
For too long, the country’s best talent has drawn from a small pool of elite or middle-class urban students, fluent in English and familiar with the ways of city life—while the reinforcing disadvantages of low caste and lower class, gender, rural environment and lack of language skills have remained largely unchanged, creating cycles of intergenerational poverty.
Paying for a coaching program that seeks to push them through the ranks of elite colleges is a system-driven impossibility. Access to a qualified mentor is just as difficult.
Saxena notes, “If you really want tribal girls in INFOSYS, you have to identify their talent and nurture them, not lose them. You have to [create a person with the skill] that fits the market need.”
● Their graduates more than double their household income when they land their first jobs.
● At this time, they are working in more than half of Indian states.
● 40% of the high school students who pass through Avanti’s Centers qualify for the national entrance exam (the JEE-Main) into India’s technical colleges—compared to the national rate of 15% for high school students who qualify for the same exam.
● Of Avanti students who crack the JEE-Main exam, 25% have entered successive freshman classes in the top 5% of India’s technical institutes; 2% of their students make their way into the top 1% of these technical institutes.
● Over 60% of Avanti students are girls. This is a remarkable attempt to correct the systemic biases against women in technical education— the data indicate that girls are half as likely to crack into top-tier technical colleges as boys, and only twenty percent likely as boys to enter the top 1% of these colleges.
Avanti’s important work depends on sustained funding. An initial for-profit branch of the program did not reach the economically-disadvantaged cohort that they had hoped to impact. This led to a switch to a completely non-profit model, sustained by donor funding through corporate social responsibility programs at established companies.
If you have thoughts about emulating this program and replicating this elsewhere, please contact [email protected]. We will gladly connect you to the right people at Avanti Fellows, India.
