As it turned out, the experience made the student unsure about whether to pursue a career as a doctor. She wanted to work in the medical field but wasn’t sure about the role. Eventually, with the help of the counsellor and after evaluating various options, she realized that instead of spending time in the trenches with patients, she wanted to work in the research field, in the more sanitized environs of a lab.
Over the next couple of years, the counsellor guided her on medical research options through video calls and personal sessions and sent her journals, articles and podcasts. Today, the student has been accepted into the elite Johns Hopkins University for a course in biomedical engineering, a field that combines biology and engineering to drive technological advances in medical devices, procedures, and patient care. She heads for the US this August.
The counsellor who helped the student land the coveted seat, outperforming applicants from around the world, was Namrata Pandey. Based in Delhi, Pandey is the founder and chief mentor of La Mentoraa, an organization that specializes in helping students gain admission into universities in India and overseas.
Over the last eight years, her company has helped more than 500 students gain admission into universities such as Harvard, Cornell, Stanford, Duke, Oxford, and the London School of Economics, among others.
Today, companies such as La Mentoraa, which prepare students to study abroad and work on their profiles for years, sometimes from middle school, are burgeoning. Others in the field include Lumiere Education, Athena Education and Revadmissions.
It helps that they have a big market to play with. According to data provided by Open Doors, an information portal on international students in the US, the number of Indian students studying in the US in the academic year 2023-24 hit an all-time high of 331,602, an uptick of 23% from 2022-23, when it stood at 268,923.
The worldwide number is much higher. According to data provided by the Indian government in Parliament last month, 750,000 Indians were studying abroad in 2022. That number shot up to 892,000 in 2023 but dipped to 759,000 in 2024 in the wake of geopolitical crises, as well as Canada and Australia tightening their admissions criteria.
Once normalcy returns, especially in the US, where President Donald Trump’s regime is currently targeting universities and their diversity and inclusion programmes, the numbers are certain to rise again. Particularly because the number of well-heeled Indian parents wanting to send their children abroad to study has risen over the years, with more joining the list each year.
“There is a tremendous fear of missing out playing in the minds of upper-middle-class parents in India,” said Suchindra Kumar, who leads the education practice at consultancy PwC. “While engineering or medical exams in India are linear and everyone has one test to take, in US universities, each college has a different style of application… Students, therefore, have higher chances of being accepted abroad with their profiles.”
Years-long effort
Getting admission in a top foreign university is no ordinary feat. Indian students have to compete not only with each other, but with others from around the world, as they all vie for the few seats that are on offer.
Indeed, the rigour a student goes through to gain admission into an elite college has only become more complex over time. A good SAT score—the Scholastic Assessment Test measures literacy, numeracy and writing skills—is not enough to make the cut as colleges sift through millions of profiles. And that’s where the mentors come in, to inject oomph into a resume and get rich doing it.
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Counsellors such as Pandey look at students’ interests and put them in touch with NGOs, and guide them toward projects that will make their Statement of Purpose (SoP) stand out from the pack.
A Statement of Purpose is a short essay that details a student’s reasons for seeking admission into a specific course. It outlines the student’s academic record, achievements and aspirations. It is a personal narrative that gives the admissions panel of a university insights into the motivations and potential of the student, and plays a crucial role in influencing their decision to grant admission.
“An applicant from a village in Bihar wrote about how his life changed when he shifted to a boarding school in Bengaluru. We spoke about his transition from playing gulli (bylane) cricket to heading the cricket, football and hockey teams in his school,” said Revathi Shivakumar, founder of Revadmissions, a boutique outfit based in Mumbai. The student is now pursuing a PhD in the US.
Revathi, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate, has a team of seven people supporting students through their journey, including essay mentoring and application support. Over the years, they have helped students get into the University of Pennsylvania, Brown, Duke, Yale, Purdue and Georgia Tech, among other institutions.
To help students gain an edge, the mentors begin working with them from standard nine onwards orienting every activity towards what will go on the application.
One of the key things mentors do, apart from grooming them for admission, is connect students with professors at global universities for references.
Athena Education uses psychometric tests to gauge a student’s interests. Parents are brought in during the initial rounds of discussions. “Excessive time spent on video games and social media or mobile is a common complaint. But what the parents do not realize is, if they ask a question on the statistics of football players to a child playing the FIFA video game, the child will rattle them off,” said Rahul Subramaniam, co-founder of Athena Education. These stats can be used to introduce the parents to the idea that, in a few years, their child can have a career in sports analytics or data science, he added.
If a student wants to take up liberal arts in a foreign university, she/he might be guided to a project that involves taking younger children on a history tour of their city during vacation. Someone looking to pursue a course in urban planning might be asked to write a white paper on restaurants in a popular part of the city and check if they are disabled- and elderly-friendly. Creating an app that can help users locate such restaurants will take that to the next level. And so, it goes.
“The applications need a back story and why a project was taken up. While it’s possible to pay to have an app developed and even boost downloads through paid methods, that often becomes evident in the essays and statement of purpose,” Pandey told Mint.
One of the key things mentors do, apart from grooming them for admission, is connect students with professors at global universities for references.
At Lumiere Education, started by Dhruva Bhat and Stephen Turban, who studied at Harvard together, students are matched with mentors who are PhD candidates or post-docs at top research universities in the US or the UK. “These mentors guide students as they write papers of about 5,000 words on topics like ‘how people’s access to sanitation differs by neighbourhood and ethnicity’, or ‘how machine learning models can predict success in sports,” Bhat told Mint.
The Ivy League
Backed by their deep pockets, parents spare no expense to get their children into an Ivy League institution. A degree in these colleges can set them back by $55,000-$80,000 a year for a four-year undergraduate course, but that doesn’t give them sleepless nights.
The prestigious Ivy League comprises Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. These eight elite colleges, located in the US Northeast, were all originally members of a national athletics league and have a shared identity.
In the 19th century, it was common to plant ivy, an evergreen plant symbolizing enduring growth, on college campuses, and the term is believed to stem from this popular tradition. According to Princeton University’s website, the term Ivy League dates back to October 1933, when a sports writer for the New York Herald Tribune used the phrase “Ivy colleges” to describe these schools.
For the mentoring companies, helping a student get into one of these prestigious colleges is the gold standard. Athena Education’s website even has a tagline that boasts: “Don’t be basic. We help you join the ranks of Ivy League admits.”
Needless to say, given who their clients are and what the job involves over many years, mentoring companies charge a bomb for their services. But it’s pocket change for their rich clientele.
Pandey’s fee to help a student with the application process ranges between ₹600,000 and ₹900,000, depending on which year the student enrolls. If the student wants help with applications in standard 12, the parents have to pay ₹600,000, while those who bring their children from class nine onwards will have to pay ₹900,000, divided evenly over the four years of high school.
Early birds
It isn’t just teenagers who are put on the overseas study track. Some parents begin the process of preparing their children for an education on foreign shores when they are still at a tender age.
In Mumbai’s Lower Parel, a pin code where multinationals and residential towers rub shoulders with each other, a 40-year-old finance specialist goes over the daily schedule of her daughter, who is just nine years old.
The child, a student of one of the top three schools offering the International Baccalaureate (IB) curriculum, is up before dawn and heads for the school at 7am for basketball practice. Through the day, apart from the usual humdrum syllabus, she learns French, Spanish, taekwondo and Bharatnatyam. She is back home by 4pm and continues her studies, before hitting the bed by 9pm. Day after day, she follows the same schedule.
She has worked as a volunteer at cancer hospitals and old-age homes. Every step she takes, every move she makes, is watched by her parents and the school, who document everything with Teutonic efficiency. In about five to six years, they hope this intense preparation will help the nine-year-old secure a seat in one of the top colleges in the US for an undergraduate course.
“Most of her classmates have a similar schedule and hardly any of her seniors pursued their undergraduate studies in India,” her mother, who did not want to be named, told Mint.
Home truths
The demand for companies that mentor students planning to go abroad must be compared to the coaching industry in India. In 2024, a total of 2.3 million students appeared for the national medical entrance test. This year, 1.3 million have registered for the engineering entrance exam. The aim is to bag a seat in a government-aided medical or engineering college, where the fees are subsidized.
Over the years, a ‘coaching’ industry has come up to cater to the millions of students taking entrance tests every year. A large chunk of students have taken tuitions from these coaching institutes, where a batch size can be 10-50 and fees range from ₹50,000- ₹170,000 a year for all subjects. This is a fraction of what the foreign-education counsellors charge.
The engineering and medical exams have a set pattern of objective questions, for which students prepare from standard 7-8 onwards. There are no personal essays, and no project work. A student’s score in the test pretty much decides his or her career choice.
Once in, the students are set. The same cannot be said about those who have gained admission in the US today. All the money and years of effort may culminate in their getting admitted into a Harvard or a Yale. But if officers in the federal government poring over student applications find an undotted i or uncrossed t, they may find themselves on the next plane back to India.
