When students choose a stream for Class 11, they usually also commit to one or more professional tracks they will prepare for and get into. Here are a few popular professional tracks:

1. Engineering: if students take the PCM (Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics) combination, they are expected to pursue an engineering track. This means they join a race where more than 11 lac (1.1 Million) students try to secure seats from about 60K (60 thousand) high-quality engineering seats. About a 4.5% success rate.
2. Medicine: If they instead take PCB (Physics, Chemistry, Biology), they are expected to pursue the medicine track, where more than 20 lac (2 Million) students try to secure seats from about 50K (50 thousand) government college seats. About a 2.5% success rate.
3. Integrated Law: Students can pursue a professional law track independent of their stream by appearing in the CLAT exam. 60K students appear for about 4K seats. About a 6.5% success rate.
4. Integrated MBA: Any student can appear for an integrated course for an MBA, which gives a career track (usually called IPM). About 20K students apply for 600 seats. About 3% success rate.
5. CA: About 75K students appear, 5-6% pass and become eligible for CA Final (after articleship).
6. Hotel Management: It has lost its charm, it seems, as about 13K students appear for about 13K seats. About 100% success rate!

As can be seen, each of these tracks admits about 5-6% of those who appear. Anyone who understands probability and statistics even a little bit should think a lot before playing a game with such poor odds.

Both medicine and engineering streams offer a way for students to improve their odds of getting a seat if they can pay extra (more on this below).

Engineering and Medicine are considered the best professional tracks by far. Notwithstanding the low success rate, students are frequently forced (usually by their parents and peer groups) to take the science stream to be eligible to try for these streams, even though the success rate is so low.

These are all professional courses. The majority of students end up pursuing a non-professional course – a BA, BSc. or BCom, or related degrees (BBA, for ex.) and then try to get into one of the professional courses after that (MBA, LLB, BEd, MTech, etc.) with similar challenges and similar odds (a topic for another time).

Unfortunately, students and parents are driven more by emotions than data when making these decisions.

Improving your odds

Medical Science Students

In Medicine, the cost of improving your odds ranges between 5 and 25 lac rupees annually! There are about 50K more seats that are offered by private universities. If you can afford it, you can take one of these seats. The reason there are only 50K such seats has to do with regulatory and compliance requirements, which make it hard to increase seats quickly.

Engineering Science Students

In Engineering, such extra seats can be had at a much lower price of 5 to 25 lac for the entire course! These are also offered by private institutes. However, unlike medicine, there is a huge number of such seats available, almost a million! This means that there is always an engineering seat available if you want it.

So, at first glance, this seems like a great opportunity if you target an engineering degree (which means you study Mathematics as a science student). This is the trap most science students and their parents fall into.

However, there is a big catch. Most of these million seats are at institutions that offer very low-quality education.

Less than 10% of such graduates are employable in decent engineering or software organisations.

Also, even during their most productive years, industries have jobs only for 20-25% of total graduates. All this means that more than 500K engineering students every year go jobless, and most of them do not have any skills (so very little chance of them getting a job in future as well).

Unfortunately, this grim reality is not understood by the parents and students. Nor is there any intent from the government to share data about this. Institutes, of course, engage in active misinformation and information hiding to ensure a good impression of the domain and their own institute.

Engineering continues to be celebrated and used as a sure-shot path to a stable career. Science students who go down this path after 12 are walking towards a career nightmare, and they are not even aware of this.

Commerce, Humanities and Social Science Students

Usually, these streams are chosen by those who get lower marks and do not get to choose the science stream. Or they don’t like science and math and have been able to convince their parents to let them take up a non-science stream. The prevalent notion is that a non-science stream doesn’t offer a professional degree path. This is not true – options like Integrated Law, Integrated MBA, and Hotel Management, as well as some other professional degrees like those in media, digital marketing, and advertising, are available to be pursued. However, these numbers are nowhere as big as those touted in engineering (which, as we have seen above, is fake and illusive).

Strategies to be successful beyond Class 12

We have been talking about degrees of various types in this article. One of the challenges that face the students and parents is that they think acquiring a degree is the most important pursuit. However, given the dilution of engineering degrees happening because of poor engineering colleges across the country, this notion of degree being the most important pursuit is no longer true.

The need of the hour is the pursuit of skills.

Degrees used to be a proxy for skills, but with the dilution, students need to pursue skills separately; they can’t rely on their degree to provide them with skills. One of the reasons we have such a high number of unemployable engineers is that the engineering degree rarely teaches the skills they should, and students are blissfully ignorant of it during their college years.

Skill acquisitions need to start after 10th grade (if not before). These can be soft skills, like verbal and written communication, planning and organising, and time management. There are different categories of skills and some/all of these should be pursued:

1. Digital skills – MS Office skills, AI skills, digital design (Canva), website development, presentation
2. Life skills – financial literacy, cooking, baking, cleaning, managing a budget, and washing clothes
3. Interests and passions – singing, playing instruments, drama and dance, teaching, blogging, caring (for elders and kids), etc.
4. Hands-on physical skills: carpentry, electrical, crafts, quilling, knitting
5. And many more..

The important thing is to pursue skill acquisition and practice them to become good at them. Many of these skills take time to build and perfect, and an early start makes you stand out when you look for a job. For example, being able to write well is a superpower that will make you stand out irrespective of the job role. However, it takes time, and if you haven’t practised it enough in school and college, it is very hard to get good at it.

Most skills worth having will take time, so starting early is always a good idea.

There is another reason for starting early. We are heading into an AI-centric world where the key to success is going to be the ability to learn every day because we won’t be able to predict what jobs we will do and what skills are required. Students of today need to develop their skill-acquisition and experience-gathering muscle because that is going to be required all the time and will be the difference between a good and a great career. Starting early gives you a better chance to succeed in future.

Career/Life Advice

It is a good idea to select a stream that aligns with what you like (and avoids what you don’t like). If you have clarity on what you like, you should convince your parents and go for it. However, it is possible that you don’t have that clarity. This is perfectly fine, too. Pick a stream based on other criteria, as long as it is your decision or you have been a part of it and believe it is the best choice under the circumstances. Given the current scenario in India, Science with Maths keeps the most number of doors open, but this is slowly changing. For example, you can now pursue one of the science disciplines or Computer Science even when you do not have Physics-Chemistry-Maths as your Class 11-12 option. So continue to explore and continue to stay aligned with what you love.

Note that if you find a subject difficult, it is NOT an indication that you should not explore or pursue it. Almost all areas of value and depth have a hard ramp-up path, and unless you spend that time where you don’t like it but doggedly pursue it, you will not be able to see the beauty of the area! So if you think maths is too hard, or history is too boring, do not discard them right away! Spend time learning them, pursuing them; find a teacher, a mentor who can guide you on them, before declaring that as an area you can’t pursue. All good things take effort, and this is the time you learn how to put hard work in areas you do not particularly like, a common phenomenon of professional life!

Whatever stream you choose, ensure that you identify a bouquet of skills that you want to acquire during the two years of school.

Spend enough time to become good at most of these skills, and you will have given the perfect boost to your career!