[juwo]

the people you met were simply making excuses and misleading you. (there is always scope for corruption in school admissions everywhere).

It is like saying, if you studied in public school in small town america, you cannot get into Harvard.

[ingenium]

Why would they make excuses and mislead me in a way that makes their country look bad? We were simply talking one day comparing the educational systems of India and the United States, and they said they favored the system here and thought it worked much better, despite receiving degrees from prestigious Indian universities such as AIIMS.

Your small town analogy doesn't work. A better analogy is if you went to a poor inner city public school, then you can't get into Harvard. This is basically true, since you don't receive a good enough education to get the scores to get in. Also, if your family is poor, especially in India, you have to work to support your family and self rather than focus on your school work, which leads to lower grades and test scores.

[rms]

But it's pretty much impossible. I went to a very good public school in a wealthy suburb and the valedictorian didn't get into Duke, let alone Harvard/Yale/Princeton/MIT/Stanford.

[ajju]

Yes except the only metric that Universities in India can use to give you admission is your score on a centralized public examination. No essays, no discretion what soever. They have to publish a huge list of everyone's scores and the top n people get in.

Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.

[ingenium]

I agree with this. I went to a private school because my family could afford it, and as valedictorian I got into every school I applied to and received full scholarships to most. The valedictorian of the public school didn't get any scholarships, not even to the local community college. Anyone who could afford to send their kids to private school did.

It's just a fact that people with more wealth have better socioeconomic opportunity than people with less wealth, not that they're more intelligent. This means better schools and better education.