Junior colleges fail to teach life skills

Hyderabad: It is often alleged that the reason many students from the two Telugu-speaking states commit suicide at the IITs is the way coaching institutions and corporate junior colleges teach them prior to their admission to the premier institutes.

Experts say that while the students are prepared academically, emphasis on character building is almost non-existent.

Students at coaching institutions have almost no time to think of anything apart from academics.

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Counselling sessions do not exist and while day scholars at least have family support, the hostellers are truly at loss.

Also, most of the Telugu IIT students who committed suicides, had prepared for the JEE in corporate junior colleges.  The latest victim, Kaki Parameswara Rao, had also studied away from his home in a corporate college at Vizag. And so did many victims before him.

 It would, of course, be wrong to blame just coaching institutions for all the suicides, but they do contribute to the problem along with other factors, including the student’s own psyche. Corporate colleges pay little attention to the emotional stress that students face or are likely to face in the future.

K. Shashank, a BITS-Pilani Hyderabad alumnus, who also studied in a corporate college, says, “Corporate colleges often feel like closed boxes. It is worse for the hostel students because they are hardly exposed to anything other than books”

“Many students settle for mediocre colleges and not for long-term coaching institutes just because they don’t want to go be in that environment. Nobody cares about the emotions of a student at the coaching institutes,” another graduate of a corporate college and Manipal alumnus B. Aditya Sree said.

FIITJEE mentor director Dr P. Anand Raman claims coaching institutions just manufacture machines and don’t turn out individuals. “Coaching institutions are there to coach students and help them get ranks. Even parents want that. They want their children to work hard and get into IITs. They seldom think about the emotions of their children,” remarked a senior lecturer.