NEET coaching business hit by up to 30% as enrolments drop sharply
Meanwhile, the NEET coaching business are already facing challenges after the government decided to align the difficulty level of NEET-UG with that of Class 12 board exams following the spate of student suicides in Kota. (Reuters)
The coaching institutes in India are witnessing 20-30% drop in their business for their NEET preparation programmes. Experts said that the decline in enrolments from the “dropper students” is impacting the business of both offline and online players.
“The dropper students, which account for nearly 40% of the overall NEET-UG enrolments, are in a wait-and-watch mode even as the enrolment for the current batch has begun,” said Kapil Gupta, co-founder and CEO of NEETprep.com, an online testing platform. Dropper students are those who have attempted the exam before but couldn’t secure a seat in the institutes of their choice.
As per some estimates, the large offline players such as Allen Career Institute, Aakash Educational Services, Physics Wallah, Sri Chaitanya, have an annual enrolment of 0.7 million students. “The enrolments for the next batch is down roughly 30%. The enrolments usually last for 3 months to July/August, and if there’s no clarity on the NEET-UG by then, the repeat students might look for other options instead of waiting for a few months to prepare again. It will be a loss of business for NEET coaching institutes this year,” said a NEET expert.
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On July, the Supreme Court is slated to hear the petitions of parents and students who have asked for the cancellation of the exams opposing the arbitrary awarding of grace marks to 1,563 candidates by the National Testing Agency (NTA) which resulted in a large number of them scoring high marks. NTA is responsible for conducting NEET-UG exams for admissions to MBBS, BDS, AYUSH and other related courses. At the same time, the ministry of education has referred the matter to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) for a thorough investigation.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty around the NEET-UG 2024 which is affecting the enrolments in a big way. Even if the candidates get some clarity in July on re-test, it’s unlikely that the dropper students would enrol for NEET-UG in October this year,” said Gupta. Experts suggest that the size of NEET-UG coaching market is roughly 13% (or Rs 7,600 crore) of the overall coaching industry (Rs 58,000 crore).
Meanwhile, the NEET coaching business are already facing challenges after the government decided to align the difficulty level of NEET-UG with that of Class 12 board exams following the spate of student suicides in Kota. In fact, education minister Dharmendra Pradhan initially defended the “exam leak” controversy by suggesting that the whole issue was instigated by the coaching centres since there’s a high number of toppers in NEET-UG 2024 because of the government’s efforts to bring down the difficulty levels in the recent years.