Devanshi Sood is all of 18 and all set to fly out to the US next month to pursue the course of her dreams. Sood studied PCME (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics and Economics) at Heritage Xperiential School, Gurugram, and has opted for a four-year bachelor’s in Computational Media at the Georgia Institute of Technology, US. “This degree will offer me room to experiment,” she says, “and help me with my interest in environment technology, a subject for which there is a huge market in the US.” Sood is choosing to go west because the subject she is primarily interested in pursuing is not available in India, and it also allows her to explore her interests in diverse subjects. “I like science and computers,” she says, “but also literature and political science.”
Every year, just as Fall begins to descend on the western hemisphere, thousands of young students like Sood, in pursuit of a quality higher education, make the long journey either to America, or midway to Europe or eastward towards Australia and the Southeast Asian countries. It is not as though Indian students were not making a beeline for foreign universities earlier. But the sheer numbers seeking international degrees, the profusion of choice in terms of destinations and the variety of courses attracting new recruits, all these speak of a tidal surge of sorts. In February this year, the Union ministry of education informed the Lok Sabha that 750,365 new students flew abroad for higher studies in 2022, the highest number in six years, and 161,642 more than in 2019. Confirmation comes from another quarter, as online platform Yocket found a total of 1.32 million Indian students studying abroad in 2022, up from 1.14 million in 2021. Gurugram-based Redseer Strategy Consultants expect the number to go up to 1.8 million by 2024. And though the US for
