In a worrying trend, both NEET and JEE- advanced examinations, which channel admission into India's medical colleges and IITs respectively have recorded very low cut off scores. A general category candidate with just 55 marks out of 360 is eligible for an IIT seat this year, even as the cut off score to qualify for a medical college seat corresponds to 50th percentile for the open category. These low scores have helped @ 10 lakh to qualify for 92,000 medical seats and @ 41,000 for the 16,000 IIT seats, but not without raising questions about the quality of candidates. Unlike the medical colleges none of the IIT seats are available for payment and the two stage entrance exam is uber tough, yet it has needed the lowest ever cutoff to produce a respectable pool of 40,000 qualified candidates. There are just not enough available seats for quality education. This explains why 82,000 Indian students opted for admission to US universities in pursuit of better opportunities. There is just no substitute for quality; India needs to build both strong domestic universities and strongly qualified admissions into them, to avoid a downward spiral in quality higher education.
