+2 Results are out again

Today, many students who wrote the +2 exams in Tamilnadu must have felt like God on the 7th day of His creation. "Phew! Finally done with it and lucky to get away with good marks!". It wouldn't have been so for a few others. Atleast the statistics don't paint a good picture. It seems the pass percentage has gone down to 74.5 compared to 76.8 last year. The reason cited was the change in syllabus last year.

Another interesting fact to note during these exams is that the girls always top the charts. The pass percentage of girls this time is 77.1 compared to the boys who stand at 71.7. This is not just the trend this year, but has been the same for almost all the years. Girls always outshine boys when it comes to studies. But, I just gave it a thought. Why doesn’t the same percentage reflect in the employment statistics? I consider this a serious question. I know many girls who have such good educational backgrounds, but have not been given a chance to utilize the knowledge. Most of them ultimately end up in managing a home and taking care of family. I wouldn’t say this is bad, but we need to think about a feature called ‘Opportunity Cost’.

Let me explain. We know how difficult it is to get an admission into a primary school, secondary school, college, university, etc. The statistics show that girls perform better than the guys, hence manage to get admissions in their preferred institutions. Also consider the fact that a school/college/university with a 100 seats normally gets around 10,000 applications. So, ultimately 9,900 students are denied an opportunity. If we consider these 100 students (assuming 50 are girls), we can easily conclude that not all the girls in this batch would go ahead and seek employment. Most of them would ultimately land up as a housewife (I don’t say all but most). What it means is that, the genuine candidates who wanted to obtain education for seeking employment were denied of an opportunity. If the parents were clear about the future of their children then why make them get all these degrees?

I feel that the investment of time/money is not really being utilized. But what pains me more is that such people are grabbing away the chance from people who are in great need of it. We need to put in an effort to foresee the future to some extent. We need to understand that our actions are not only going to affect our lives but also the lives of others. I do not mean to say that girls should not take up education or employment. That is definitely not my intent. I would be happy to see an India which has more girls in schools, colleges and offices. This blog just voices the cries of the many girls who were denied an opportunity by others who took up theirs and ultimately landed up without doing justice to their education.