EDUCATION SPECIAL................ IIT Grads Get Hot Jobs as Change Agents

IIT Grads Get Hot Jobs as Change Agents





For-profit venture Avanti ropes IIT Grads in to help the underprivileged make it to premier institutes; uses `flipped' classroom model

A 22-year-old chemical engineering graduate from one of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) wouldn't find it too difficult to land a generous job offer. However, Krishna Choudhury, class of 2015, IIT Guwahati, has gone off the beaten track and turned teacher at a startup, where he will try and help more underprivileged students get into his alma mater. The level of job satisfaction more than makes up for a much lower salary.

Choudhury works at Avanti, a for-profit venture backed by the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation and the Pearson Affordable Learning Fund, which is turning the classroom on its head and drawing top IIT graduates as faculty.It has a teaching staff of 75 at its centres across India. Of these, 40 are from the IITs, most of them in their 20s and earning about a fourth of what they would have got elsewhere.

“Among the most exciting things we've been able to achieve is attracting India's best undergraduates to roles in the education sector,“ said Avanti president and co-founder Akshay Saxena, an IIT Bombay alumnus. “All of our recruits have a passion for teaching but what's most exciting for our team is that we're working towards re-imagining education.“

Hasratpreet Kaur is the first engineer from her village of Jati Majra in Punjab's Sangrur district, having graduated from IIT Delhi this year. A farmer's daughter, Kaur found the Avanti model of teaching so compelling that she decided to shun a corporate career and join the organisation. “It helped that I always wanted to be a teacher eventually,“ she said.

Avanti was established in 2010 to provide affordable, high-quality education to disadvantaged students aspiring to study at India's top colleges.Having turned for-profit in 2012, it has centres in Mumbai, Delhi, Kanpur, Chennai and other locations. Besides the IITs, it's also hired graduates from the National Institutes of Technology and St Stephen's in Delhi. So what's the attraction?
“I believe that the biggest draw for highquality talent, for example IIT alumni, towards Avanti is the company's social mission, and a performance-based culture for achieving that mission,“ said Prachi Windlass, director of education, India, Michael & Susan Dell Foundation. “Admission into a top engineering college is a life-transforming experience, and who understands that better than young graduates.“

Many of these young people want to give back to society in a meaningful way , while furthering their own professional aspirations. Avanti provides them that platform: a fast-growing, highpotential startup that's tightly bound to its mission of improving college entrance success rates for underprivileged children, Windlass said.

“We had to turn the classroom on its head,“ said Saxena. “You have to be very disruptive in how classrooms are run.“

The `flipped model' has been developed in collaboration with Harvard University educator Eric Mazur. It moves the focus to pre-class conceptual clarity through vernacular language videos and in-class peer learning from more traditional methods adopted at coaching centres.

“The biggest differentiator at Avanti is intense emphasis on the fact that our content is rigorously designed. We have a content-specific model that is scalable,“ said Ashwin Krishnan, who leads curriculum design. A mechanical engineering graduate, class of 2011, IIT Bombay, he turned down an offer from a consulting firm to join Teach for India, a non-profit organisation. Avanti was “a logical extension.“

For a new education model to evolve, profit has to be a motive, founder Saxena said. There is a need to attach risk capital and talent and that can only happen in such an environment, he added.

Avanti's coaching model has seen 18 students from Hindi-speaking, low-income backgrounds get into top engineering colleges this year. The two-year programme costs such candidates . 25,000-35,000 a year, one-third of what other ` coaching institutes charge. Of the 102 Avanti students who wrote the IIT Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) this year, 57 went through to the next stage with 18 clearing JEE Advanced.

The IIT entrance exam has a 10% clearance rate but this slumps to less than 2% for state board students, according to estimates. The se lection is skewed towards urban, Central Board of Secondary Education students who have access to coaching hubs such as Kota.

That's one reason why Avanti targets smalltown aspirants, having recently launched cen tres in Chhapra in Bihar and Raghogarh in Madhya Pradesh where it's signed up close to 250 stu dents. “This bears testimony to the access and affordability our product creates,“ said Saxena.

And while teachers at other coaching hubs are paid crores of rupees, Avanti's teachers are paid `. 4-6 lakh annually as starting pay, with the promise of a 25-30% hike in a year. Most of them move into operations after the first year. In two years, they begin to manage regions and own a t business unit. For instance, Choudhury is be ing groomed to lead North East operations for the organisation.

Avanti aims to expand its footprint across the t country . “The goal is to produce at least one II Tian and at least 10 top-notch engineers from ev ery tehsil in India,“ says Saxena. “We're hiring aggressively across functions like academics, op erations and technology to make sure our human resources, technology and curriculum ramp up to meet this goal. We aim to grow to well over 5,000 students and 100 centres in the next fiscal year.“

Saumya Bhattacharya

ET3JUL15