Shifting to a bigger city for better Results?, Worth it? TCYonline Blog

Shifting to a bigger city for better Results?, Worth it?

Pay a visit to Sector 36 , Chandigarh, you will find Paying Guest accommodations full of IIT /AIIMS dreamers from Himachal Pradesh, Punjab and adjoining Haryana & Rajasthan. You, in all probability would also come across many parents who have temporarily or permanently shifted to the city for their kids’ better educational exposure.Ditto Old Rajinder Nagar, Delhi which is thronging with young UPSC aspirants fromfrom UP, Bihar and around.

There is a huge infrastructural gap in supplementary education facilities in tier 1&2 cities versus tier 3 . The main issues include inadequate physical infrastructure, fewer star teachers, thoroughly researched and updated courseware, all three critical components for exam success.

So, many aspirants for engineering, medical, UPSC, CAT, GRE or other exams prefer to migrate to a larger city in search for better educational opportunities to fulfil their dreams.

The improved lifestyle and access to better learning opportunities that tier 1 & 2 cities believe to offer, puts tremendous financial burden on students who are not from very affluent sections of society. Tuition fee, housing, food & transportation make the bulk of these expenses pushing many students and parents towards debt.

This study examines if it is really worth the effort, money and time to shift to a larger city. TCY has students joining from every nook and corner of the country, small towns or big cities; hence in this study it is taken to be representative of the general trend in India. The student demographic data points captured were separated based on the city where the student was studying. The metadata on question items attempted were used to give each student a standardised score on different skills. The difference of mean was compared using a two tailed t-test to test the hypothesis: There is a significant difference between the performance of students across various skill categories for metro v/s non-metro students to test for 95% confidence level. The result of the two tailed test has been summarized in the table below.

It is evident that moving to a tier -1 city doesn’t offer much advantage for skills required to excel in mathematical sciences, butstudents from metro students have performed better than non-metro students in skills that form a major part of all competitive exams, like quantitative aptitude, data handling, verbal ability and general knowledge. So the data suggests that shifting to a larger city has its advantages. We would like to examine this premise again in a future study to know if the proliferation of online courses which claim to bring ina level playing field for tier-3 city students made any difference to the current inequality. Stay tuned.