The one-stop for the biggest shifts in India’s $180 billion education market. Served hot and weekly, Thursdays.
Good Morning Dear Reader,
Welcome back to Ed Set Go. I have to pinch myself to believe that this is already our fourth edition. Over the last three weeks, Ed Set Go has taken you on a bit of an education rollercoaster—from the logic behind the DU cut-off system to why content is still king in an increasingly specialised edtech industry.
This week, I thought I’d revisit a pet peeve about the relationship (or lack thereof) between Indian edtech and metrics. Fair warning, there are a lot of images. Also in this edition: are teacher-centric edtech models the way forward? Hint: Yes. If you follow the money.
Location, location, location
Ranks are prime real estate in India. It’s all about locating yourself in the top 100. It’s a ticket to a better, 3-BHK type life with a lot of balconies and natural light. Just ask all the IIT-ians whose startups are flush with VC money.
Ranks are also crucial in a country like India, where only a fraction of those who prepare or sit for competitive exams actually make it to the end of the filtration process. This year, over 9 lakh students gave the Joint Entrance Exam, or JEE, to secure a seat in the elusive IITs. But with an acceptance rate that hovers between 1.7% to 2%, the chances are often slim-to-none if you don’t have a great rank location on the results list. For example, there’s a 44-way tie for first place in this year’s rankings.
Now, it helps if educational institutions also garner a bit of this real estate for themselves. That’s why, periodically, the front page of our newspapers look like this:
That’s great use of two types of real estate by these institutes: the front page and the rank of students. For decades, offline test-prep companies have used this winning combination to attract students to their coaching centers. Though it came undone during the Covid-19 pandemic, there is a physical mecca called Kota in western India that was spun purely from the desire to get this type of real estate under the belt.
For a long time, after-school tuitions (or coaching, or any type of extra help) was about getting a good rank in an engineering or medical entrance exam. Even for students without the lofty “engineer-doctor” ambitions, the act of studying was about scoring well in an eventual exam paper. Learning was a forgotten byproduct of “studying” or “practising”.
When the online upstarts rolled in, they wanted to carve out some of this real estate for themselves. But they needed a niche. They couldn’t really target the front pages in the same way that institutes like Aakash, Allen Career, or Sri Chaitanya were doing. They had to come up with something cooler, something beyond ranks. Here’s an excerpt from an article on Byju’s marketing strategy:
“Conceptualised by LinEngage, the film shows children from different age groups speaking about 'love'. They're blushing as they recount their 'first experience'. One of them says, 'We hated each other in the beginning', while another child says, 'It used to drive me mad'. 'My friends tease me, but I don't care' opines yet another child featured. One of the boys adds, 'My mom dad know about it and they're very happy for me'. It's then revealed that the children in the film are talking about subjects they're learning on the Byju's app. The voice over says, 'Come fall in love with learning, with Byju's' the learning app'.” (The bold emphasis is mine.)
This ad-campaign by Byju’s, conceptualised in 2015, was markedly different from what the offline industry was promoting.
It features just one face prominently. And it’s not a student.
It makes a vague promise about “falling in love with learning”. Not a rank.
More than anything, it promises a “customised” programme for one student. Not a factory that relies on sheer numbers and the law of averages to produce “toppers”. In fact—and quite contrary to their in-person sales pitch—there’s no mention of marks, topping, rank, or position at all. But it’s implied.
What’s also implied is that Byju’s cares about learning more than these predetermined markers of success. The goalpost had shifted. (It is to be noted, though, that in the Byju Raveendran origin story, “cracking” the CAT exam plays an outsized role.)
Byju’s set the tone for occupying a different type of real estate. The penthouse of learning, if you will, where you get in at the top floor. Which also seemed much more attractive than going up the vertical shaft of ranks. Sure, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, since ranks were targeted at slightly older students and their parents. But you get the picture.
Byju’s re-positioning helped many other edtechs that followed to come up with their own versions. Notice the use of words like “learning” and “success” and the unmissable Bill Gates career trajectory.
This is the dominant public narrative of edtech now. It has been for the last few years, especially when these startups cater to younger and younger grades. It’s also the type of messaging that edtechs pay big marketing dollars for. A Livemint report from 2020 estimates that, all together, edtechs would have splurged Rs 500 crore on advertising during that year’s Indian Premier League (IPL). And it wasn’t for static images of rank holders.
Here’s the rub though. What’s good to look at and sounds reassuring in an ad campaign is extremely hard to prove in a real-life scenario. Or let’s put it this way, no one in the edtech ecosystem is incentivised to do so.
The elusive Bill Gates guarantee
Imagine if a parent actually walked up to a WhiteHat Jr executive and asked to see proof that students who went through their coding programme are on track to becoming the next Bill Gates or Sundar Pichai. You think I’m exaggerating, but edtech whistleblower extraordinaire Pradeep Poonia has asked this very question to a WhiteHat Jr teacher/sales rep in a series of YouTube videos he made on the company. Now, you can coach a teacher to answer with even more marketing spiel. But there’s no real answer for where someone’s future potential might take them. Unless, of course, you find a way to track it.
Take this SMS I got last evening.
“Could work on a real satellite”. This type of promise is a lot more vague than the promise or possibility of getting an All India Rank through a coaching center.
So imagine my non-surprise when Careers360 did a mini-investigation around this uncharacteristic Byju’s ad.
(Source: Careers360)
No Shahrukh Khan. No love for learning. Just cold, hard ranks. A hark back to an older, more direct, more basic marketing strategy.
The irony, though, is that none of the toppers pictured here actually paid Byju’s money for any coaching material or “personalised” learning. As the Careers360reports, Byju’s simply borrowed the real estate of their ranks to promote its own IAS coaching. Here’s an excerpt:
Varuna Agrawal, AIR 38, who has been named in the advertisement, did not attend any form of coaching with Byju for the UPSC 2020 exam. “I was not [Byju’s] student. I only gave a mock interview during the CSE 2019 attempt. In my journey of two UPSC CSE interviews, I ended up giving 25 to 30 mock interviews of which 90 percent were free. Byju’s was just one of them,” said Agrawal. C Yashwant Kumar Reddy, AIR 93, said he attended mock interviews offered by as many as 30 coaching institutes and Byju’s was just one of them. “I did not attend any course with Byju’s,” he said.
This tactic is fairly common with offline institutes. Multiple coaching institutes often claim rights over the same toppers. And it’s not uncommon for new-age edtechs to also follow the same pattern. Here’s a Vedantu “ranker” who’s also been claimed, publicly, by an offline rival:
(Source: The Ken)
But why do cutting-edge edtechs rely on the same maudlin tactics, after spending millions of marketing dollars on their catchy taglines? Because ranks are still the only reliable metric for edtechs to claim some kind of efficacy. It gives them adjacency to something legitimate and tangible, instead of lofty goals like “NASA astronaut” or starting a “love affair with learning”.
And mapping true learning outcomes is a hard, expensive, multi-year job. It would take a sophisticated randomised control trial (RCT), a willing sample set of students (or companies), and a financial backer. These types of studies would also only hint at what’s working, because it's not possible to completely isolate a student from different types of learning and coaching environments.
Relying on ranks is just easier and much more visual. Also, the results of an RCT don’t make for a great front page photo in a newspaper ad.
Edtechs are victims of their own monstrous creations. Because, you know, more money, more VCs. More VCs, more nonsensical metrics. More metrics, less time. Less time, less efficacy.
So edtechs are stuck in three endless loops of instant gratification, which are getting harder and harder to break:
For investors, they need to spin a story around engagement metrics, because engagement has become a proxy for efficacy.
For the average parent, they have to flaunt prime rank real estate, because ranks are a proxy for success.
In the midst of all of this, the primary stakeholder, the student, continues to work under the misconception that scoring marks is a proxy for learning. That’s the third loop.
So, millions of dollars and hundreds of edtechs later, where did the needle move again?
Back bench
Teaching to the test: Most school-level Indian education is about acing an exam. That’s why publishing books full of “previous years' exam papers” is an industry unto itself. But thanks to Covid-19, for the first time, students will be flying blind in the upcoming Class X boards. Because there’s no precedent to the 90-minute, truncated MCQ board paper they’re going to face—an exam which will be completely bereft of any subjective-style questions. So there are only wrong answers, I’m afraid.
Teachers 2.0: Teachmint, a self-proclaimed “ed-infra” player, has raised a cool $78 million from marquee investors, and could soon be the sixth edtech unicorn out of India. Teachmint’s USP is that it lets teachers set up virtual classrooms at the click of a few buttons. In a market teeming with student products, it’s checking in on the teacher. Edtech products have usually by-passed teachers and classrooms completely, going straight to the student. Teachmint’s funding, undoubtedly fuelled by Covid-19, is a sign that the winds might be shifting—towards more human capital, not away from it. Of course the big edtechs aren’t going to be left behind. Byju’s claims to employ 12,000 teachers, while Unacademy has a roster of “star teachers” who garner millions of views.
I always say that the golden age of teachers is coming back.
The difference, though, is that teacher employment is a by-product of catering to the student. But what if your business model was built around the common teacher who wants to go online? Will they pay up? Now that’s a question worth tracking.
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That’s all for today. I’ll be back at 7 am next Thursday with a brand new edition of Ed Set Go. Till then, do keep the wonderful comments and suggestions coming in at [email protected] I look forward to them 🙂
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