Reply #12: Many, possibly most, paid nothing.

[Xithras]

I worked with a very nice woman from India for quite some time. She wasn't an H1B, but she wasn't a citizen either.

She explained that technical schooling in India is essentially free for anyone who passes a few tests demonstrating the aptitude for the schooling. India does this because they realize that college educated students earn more and pay more taxes than the uneducated. Paying for schooling is revenue positive overall for the government (most U.S. state schools, which are partially subsidized by the state governments, operate on the same principle).

There is another aspect to this that isn't discussed much in the west. While schooling is technically free, India is a fairly corrupt country and there is a very culturally ingrained sense of entitlement among many workers. When I asked her to clarify, she gave me these examples. Her dad was a shopkeeper and needed to have a second telephone line installed. The telephone company sent a guy out to fix it, but the repairman demanded a payoff (about $20 US, quite a bit of money in India back in the 1980's) before he'd install the line. He paid it. If he hadn't, the guy would have left. Complaining to the telephone company wouldn't have helped because asking for payouts isn't actually illegal there, and in complaining he would have found himself blacklisted...no other phone repair guys would have ever come out. The police operate under the same principles. If you have a crime problem in your neighborhood, the ONLY way to increase police patrols in your area is for residents to pool their money and pay off the local police. According to her, virtually EVERY public entity works this way. They HAVE to, because most of these institutions pay so poorly that the workers couldn't survive otherwise.

The same system exists in higher ed. While on the surface it's free, you'll end up paying bribes to the assessment test administrators, to the admissions officers, and to just about everyone else on up the chain. Even some faculty aren't above taking bribes for good grades (to their credit, it's uncommon for them to EXPECT bribes, but they almost never turn them down). Paying someone to get the results you want is simply part of that culture. As she explained, it's not even looked on as a negative thing to most Indian born people...it's simply how things are done. Still, the bribes do add up, and it can be prohibitively expensive for a poor rural Indian to go to college as a result.