> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://theinstitutionalist.jetri.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why India Trusts Private Schools But Not Private Universities - URL: https://theinstitutionalist.jetri.com/why-india-trusts-private-schools-but-not-private-universities/ - Published: 2026-08-08T20:20:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-18T15:41:05.000Z - Description: Why have private schools earned families’ confidence while private universities still face scepticism? A conversation about credibility, affordability and value. - Author: Jetri Press Desk - Tags: Jetri Dialogs India's education has a curious contradiction. Over the past three decades, private capital has transformed both schools and higher-ed institutions, and millions of Indian parents actively aspire to send their children to private schools. Yet when the same students turn 18, many families approach private universities with considerably greater caution. The difference is not simply about private versus public education. India has historically placed enormous trust in public universities, particularly institutions such as the IITs and AIIMS, while private schools became a familiar and aspirational part of the K–12 landscape. So why did one part of private education earn trust more consistently than the other? This episode of Jetri Dialogs brought this question into focus through a conversation between Maheshwer Peri, Chairman and Founder of Careers360, and Saurav Sinha, Principal of Mayo College, moderated by Shreyasi Singh, Managing Partner at Jetri. The discussion was not about defending or criticising private education. Instead, it examined how trust is created, why it is easier to sustain in school education, what makes higher education different, and what private universities would have to do to earn credibility over time. ## Is the Premise Really That Simple? The conversation began by challenging its own premise. Does India really trust private schools but not private universities? Has India earned enough confidence in public universities to make that contrast? Maheshwer Peri agreed with the broad argument that schools are more trusted than universities, but his explanation was structural rather than ideological. Schools are a need. Parents generally look at the schools around them and choose one, and the relationship begins with the parent rather than the child. It can continue for 10 or 12 years, with parents regularly interacting with teachers, school leadership and other families. Higher education is different. Once students enter university, the relationship becomes considerably more transactional: families begin asking what they paid and what they are likely to receive in return. Saurav Sinha started with an important point: > > **"The problem really is our whole attitude towards education, not in school, not in college, but as a society. Education has been brought down to a very, what will it do for me?"** He also added an important historical dimension. India has traditionally trusted private education at the school level while placing its greatest faith in government higher education. Institutions such as the IITs and AIIMS represented the most trusted end of the university system, while private schools had already become established as a preferred choice for many families. He suggested that this pattern is changing as private higher education begins to establish credible institutions of its own. ## What Are Parents Really Buying When They Choose a School? If the school relationship is so long and so deeply connected to parents, what are families actually trusting when they choose an institution such as Mayo College? For Mr Sinha, the answer is a combination of values, experience, quality, brand and affiliation. Mayo College has been associated with particular values and traditions for more than 150 years. Its alumni network reinforces that reputation, and families are therefore buying into more than a curriculum. They are buying into an institutional identity, a guarantee of a particular experience and an affiliation that can remain valuable long after the student leaves school. Mr Sinha also noted that within the segment of schools in which Mayo College operates, its fees are relatively low given its facilities and residential model, even though the institution remains beyond the reach of many families. This matters because trust is not built entirely through outcomes. It is built through the experience of the journey itself. A school can take 10 or 15 years to demonstrate what it stands for. During those years, parents are continually observing the institution, their children are experiencing it, and alumni eventually reinforce or challenge the reputation that preceded them. ## How Do Schools Build Trust? A revealing question in the conversation was whether schools generate trust because they create hundreds of small, visible moments of evidence. Schools are particularly good at making activity and learning visible. A classroom interaction, a report card, a sports day, a performance, a competition, a parent meeting or a conversation with a teacher may not individually prove that an institution is excellent. But together, they create a continuous record. Parents know what is happening because they are repeatedly brought into the life of the institution. Mr Sinha advised,“The more you interact, the better the degree of transparency, which brings in a certain amount of confidence.” The communication itself can create trust because people understand what is happening and why. However, large schools are already beginning to face some of the same challenges as universities because scale reduces direct access to leadership and makes individual relationships harder to maintain. Trust, therefore, is not a permanent property of K–12\. It is a dynamic relationship that has to be continually renewed. ## Why Is This Much Harder for Universities? The same model becomes difficult to reproduce in higher education. When an 18-year-old enters university, parents have far less visibility into the academic journey. They may have to wait four, five or six years before they can see the ultimate outcome. There is also no single centralised mechanism that consistently evaluates the quality of learning across universities. In school, the institution teaches the student but an external board such as CBSE, ICSE, or another recognised board assesses and certifies the outcome. The teaching institution and the final assessment mechanism are therefore separated. In university, the institution is much more directly responsible for curriculum, assessment and the degree itself. That creates a fundamental trust problem. If one university awards a particular CGPA and another awards the same CGPA under very different academic standards, the number itself becomes difficult to interpret. ## When the Promise and the Outcome Diverge The problem becomes more serious when the promise made at admission is substantially different from the experience at graduation. Mr Peri argued that the issue is particularly visible when universities use grades, placements and career outcomes as signals of quality. If a student is told that strong academic performance will translate into strong employability, but the student later discovers that the grades do not correspond to actual capability, the shock can be significant. He even pointed out, “A lot of universities actually manufacture a CGPA to keep everyone in good humor” According to Mr Peri, some institutions manipulate grading partly because placement systems create incentives around CGPAs. If employers set a threshold such as 8.0, institutions have an incentive to ensure enough students cross that threshold, even when the grade may not accurately represent capability. He explained,“An employer recruiting a person would look at many things, and not just his CGPA. They will look at the integrity of the person when they meet up, they look at the intent of the person, they look at the character of the person, they look at the attitude of the person. So, it is not CGPA that's getting you a job. None of us recruit people based on the highest marks that someone has got. It's one of the signaling things, but not the only signaling thing.” This is where trust breaks down. ## Have Private Universities Become Too Good at Signalling Quality? Over the past decade, institutions have become increasingly skilled at communicating outcomes. Highest salary packages, average salaries, rankings, international partnerships, campus infrastructure and other indicators have become powerful marketing tools. But a signal is not necessarily the same thing as quality. The danger is that institutions begin building the appearance of quality rather than the underlying quality itself. Mr Peri said, “Signaling which is based on a placement is not necessarily bad. But signaling falsely to put them in a certain cohort is what creates a problem.” This does not make outcomes irrelevant. But none of these should be mistaken for the whole educational experience. The more sophisticated the signal becomes, the more important it is to ask what sits underneath it. ## What Should a New University Borrow from Schools? If someone were setting up a university tomorrow, what should they borrow from schools? Mr Sinha's answer was accessibility. Universities can appear extremely inaccessible to both students and families. At a school such as Mayo, a student can approach the head of the institution directly. Parents know that there is a system for feedback and redressal. The scale of universities makes this more difficult, but that does not remove the responsibility. Universities can still create channels through which students and parents know whom to approach, how concerns are handled and how decisions are communicated. Mr Sinha also rejected the idea that a trusted school should automatically start a university simply because it already has a trusted brand.He said.“If there was an extension to be made, I can think of a horizontal extension where we create another school,” Schools and universities operate in fundamentally different environments. They require different skills, personnel, systems and operational capabilities. A successful school therefore does not automatically have the expertise required to run a successful university. ## How Should Families Choose When Rankings Are Imperfect? The next question addressed a particularly difficult problem: what happens when even the signals, such as rankings, accreditation and regulatory recognition, are themselves imperfect? The discussion referred to institutions appearing in the top levels of rankings while also facing allegations or evidence of academic and research misconduct. How, then, should students and parents decide? Mr Peri's response was that students reveal their preferences through their choices. The willingness of students to enrol can sometimes tell a different story from rankings. He pointed to Ashoka as an example of an institution that has attracted students despite not depending on a prominent ranking position. Similarly, student choices around public institutions and affiliated colleges can reveal which institutions actually command demand. The lesson here is to look at revealed preference alongside formal rankings. - Who wants to attend? - Who gets admitted? - Where do students go after graduating? - What do alumni say? - What do employers think? - What happens when the marketing material is stripped away? He said,“Parents and students exactly know what's happening around. Having said that, our concern should be about the bottom 20% who may just still go by what's been sold to them. And that's a worry that we should be working on.” ## What Role Does Legacy Play? Legacy is one of the strongest forms of trust available to an educational institution. But it also creates a responsibility. Mr Sinha declared,“The legacy is based on certain values, and those values have to keep manifesting themselves in newer practices all the time.” His experience at Mayo College illustrates the challenge. The institution has been associated with particular values and traditions for more than 150 years, but those values have to remain meaningful to contemporary students and families. For new universities, the problem is the reverse. They have no history to fall back on. Their founders' intentions, the capital behind the institution, their academic choices, the quality of their faculty and their early graduating cohorts all become part of the evidence from which a reputation is constructed. ## What Is the Playbook for New Private Universities? India's higher-education system needs to expand significantly. The discussion referenced the need to move the Gross Enrolment Ratio from around 28% towards 50%. Private capital and private philanthropy will inevitably be important to that expansion. > The question is therefore how they should build trust while expanding. > According to Mr Peri, the first principle is **intention**. He said,“The first thing that is extremely important is the intent and integrity of the capital that's coming into an institution.” Mr Sinha argued that there is nothing inherently wrong with education being a business venture, provided it is treated as an educational business venture. He said,“You cannot look for quick returns, you cannot look for high profitability, and you better be willing to give it the respect it's due, and I feel if you do that, you can really make a lot of money, and plus make a really good name.”Education requires patience. An institution has to be willing to invest before it can expect reputation and returns. ## Can Private Capital Build Trust at Scale? India cannot simply add a handful of elite universities and expect the problem to disappear. The country needs a large expansion of higher education capacity, and private capital is likely to be one of the major engines of that growth. But expansion without quality can actually make trust worse. Peri argued, “The issue is not about how transparent the process is, it all starts by the fact that the supply chain of good quality education institutions is lesser in this country, which is when there is so much scarcity and so much desperation. And when there is greater desperation, it will always lead to some people trying to exploit that desperation.” A demographic dividend does not appear automatically because a country has a young population. The country therefore needs to invest more heavily in education and its young population. ## Why Are Public Institutions Still So Trusted? This brings the conversation to one of the most important dimensions of the trust question: public institutions. Public universities are trusted not simply because they are public. They have historically combined two powerful features: selectivity and affordability. Mr Peri pointed out,“What happens is public institutions, because they're very affordable, have more people chasing them. The more people that chase that, the better the quality of filtering.” That combination has made them one of India's most important pathways for social and economic mobility. The best public institutions can therefore attract large numbers of highly capable students. Strong students attract strong faculty; strong faculty attract employers and research opportunities; successful graduates build alumni networks; and those alumni reinforce the institution's reputation. A self-reinforcing cycle emerges. And once the cycle is triggered, it becomes a default option. But there is a problem: public institutions cannot meet the scale of India's demand. That leaves India with a difficult question: How can private higher education expand access without becoming so expensive that it excludes the very population whose educational aspirations the expansion is supposed to serve? ## Why Public Fees and Subsidies Matter Affordability is not merely a social-policy question. It shapes the entire higher-education market. Mr Peri made a much stronger argument: public institutions should help determine the price benchmark for quality education. He argued,“Public institutions must determine and regulate the market by coming into the market themselves and getting the best students with the best faculty at a lesser price by subsidizing their entire education. And private places will fall in line by creating a model which works for themselves.” If a student can receive an excellent education at an affordable, subsidised public institution, a private university charging a substantially higher fee has to demonstrate why its premium is justified. It might offer better infrastructure, specialised programmes, stronger faculty, international opportunities, industry relationships, research or a different educational model. But it would have to compete on value. But how do we achieve it? Mr Peri proposed, “Create 40% public institution supply, great quality at affordable price, and subsidize that. Let the private frets compete with that.” This is an important distinction. Subsidy is not simply about helping individual students. It can be a mechanism for keeping the entire education market competitive. ## When Education Becomes a Capital Investment The affordability question becomes even more serious when viewed from the perspective of families. Mr Peri contrasted his own student years with the present situation,“In my time, when I was studying, fees were a revenue expenditure. Today, it's a capital investment.” Families may have to break fixed deposits, sell land or liquidate assets to pay for a child's education. When the financial burden reaches that level, expectations change. Families understandably demand a return. And when institutions make aggressive claims about employability or outcomes to justify high fees, the risk of mistrust increases if those claims do not materialise. The answer, therefore, cannot simply be better marketing. It has to include a better economic model. ## Do We Really Need Everyone to Go to University? The discussion then moved beyond how to make universities more trusted to a more fundamental question: **does everyone need a university degree?** India has expanded higher education dramatically, but the panel questioned whether the traditional university model can realistically provide high-quality education and employment pathways to everyone at the scale required. Mr Sinha pointed to the example of Germany, where a young person from a highly educated family can pursue a multi-year practical apprenticeship, develop mastery in a trade and later return to formal education. The point was not that university education has no value. It was that India has become too fixated on the idea that everyone must become a degree-holder. If the bachelor's degree becomes a default credential rather than evidence of meaningful learning, its value can decline. The alternative is to create stronger vocational, polytechnic and apprenticeship pathways that give students practical skills and a route into employment. ## What Does This Mean for the Future of Work? The degree debate also connects directly to questions about the future of work. If curricula are changing rapidly, if technology is transforming jobs and if skills are becoming more important, what happens to conventional degrees? The discussion raised questions about homeschooling, curriculum reform and whether degrees such as computer science will continue to make sense in their current form. But the deeper issue is scale. India already has tens of millions of people in higher education, and simply increasing the number of universities may not produce the quality or employability the country needs. Alternative pathways therefore become essential. ## What Can Schools Do About the Obsession with Degrees? If students do not necessarily need a university degree, should schools be doing more to communicate that? Mr Sinha argued that the responsibility does not primarily sit with schools. Schools are often expected to produce holistic, well-rounded students, but universities frequently continue to select students using narrow academic measures. In that sense, schools are partly custodians of a system whose next stage still places enormous weight on numbers. The problem is therefore larger than school counselling. If universities continue to define success primarily through academic scores and conventional degrees, families will continue to chase those degrees. While schools can expose students to different possibilities, the broader ecosystem has to make those possibilities credible. ## Are Degrees Actually Becoming Irrelevant? There is certainly increasing discussion about employers hiring for skills rather than credentials and about creating more vocational and apprenticeship-based pathways. But the panel suggested that the conversation may currently be moving faster than actual behaviour. For many middle-class and upper-middle-class Indian families, university remains the expected destination after school. There is significant social pressure around conventional markers of success. The discussion referred to the "IIT or bust" mentality in which one family's child's admission becomes a benchmark against which other families judge themselves. That social pressure is difficult to change simply by announcing that degrees are no longer necessary. Behaviour will change when credible alternatives exist. ## What Should Universities Focus on Now? As the discussion was concluding, the lessons became clearer. The first is the right **intention**. Education can be financially sustainable. There is nothing inherently wrong with making money from education. But it has to be treated as an educational enterprise rather than a short-term financial opportunity. The second is **patience**. Universities cannot expect to establish a credible reputation immediately. They need to stay around long enough for students to graduate, employers to evaluate them and alumni to build a network. The third is **accessibility**. Students and families need to know what is happening, whom they can approach and how decisions are made. The fourth is **honest signalling**. Premium schools themselves are increasingly communicating university-placement outcomes in ways that resemble business-school marketing. If private universities rely on the same approach, trust-building can easily become another exercise in marketing rather than evidence. ## What Would Be the First Sign That India Truly Trusts Private Universities? The final question returned to the title itself. What would be the first sign that India had genuinely started trusting private universities—not just three or four exceptional institutions, but private universities as a category? Maheshwer Peri's answer was deliberately sobering: "Not in my lifetime." His concern was not with private capital entering education. It was with affordability and social diversity. If private universities remain accessible primarily to a narrow economic segment, they cannot fully become institutions that represent the country as a whole. For trust to become widespread, private higher education would therefore need to become more affordable and socially inclusive. Students and families would need to see private universities not simply as expensive alternatives, but as credible choices whose quality justifies what they charge. The real test of trust, ultimately, would be when private universities no longer depend on scarcity or marketing to attract students, but are chosen because families genuinely believe in the education and value they provide. ## Final thoughts India's hesitation toward private universities is ultimately a question of trust, affordability and demonstrated value. Unlike established schools and public institutions, newer private universities have yet to build the history and credibility that comes with decades of consistent outcomes. Building that trust will require more than rankings and placement figures. Private universities must demonstrate quality, transparency and long-term commitment, while public institutions must continue to provide strong, affordable alternatives that keep the wider market competitive. India does not simply need more universities. It needs more institutions that students and families can genuinely trust — and that trust will have to be earned over time.