Blessing in disguise: Pandemic gives a leg up to Edtech major upGrad

UpGrad 2.0 will expand focus from professionals to include fresh graduates as it enters a new phase of its own evolution

It was finally towards the end of 2013 that Mayank Kumar hit the final nail on the head. In late 2013, he found himself in a faceless and nameless engineering college in Greater Noida area, one of the innumerable institutions that dot the North Indian landscape, while working on a project for German media company Bertelsmann

For all practical purposes, the college didn’t appear to be functional. There were several empty rooms and virtually pin drop silence. On the second floor, in one large room, he came across all of four students studying. The four boys – two from Chattisgarh, one from Bihar and one from Bengal – said that they were receiving a more than indifferent education with teachers who rarely showed up although their parents had taken hefty loans to pay for their studies. The students had only come to college to meet the required attendance criteria for a degree. It was evident to all that their future after they earned a degree was far from assured. Mayank, now 37, recalls feeling terrible at their helplessness and the sheer unfairness of it all.

The incident reinforced Mayank’s belief that quality education at the college level was extremely rare in India. Although he himself was the product of a highly subsidized (Kendra Vidyalaya and IIT-Delhi) public education system, he knew he was one of very few. Of the 150 million odd eligible to be in college, only 35-40 million found themselves there. Of these, even fewer received a quality education. Prior to Bertelsmann, Mayank had spent five years with education consultancy Parthenon and come to the conclusion that very few education start ups were offering a high quality product and even fewer in the higher education space. He was clear that if he ever forayed into this space, he would offer a high quality product that brought academics and industry together. There was no point in adding to the pool unemployable graduates.

Mayank had also witnessed another trend entrench itself. Unlike his parent’s time - his own father spent 30 years in HR – today’s youth would span multiple jobs in a career spanning 30 years. Gone were the days when you earned one degree and made good of it for the rest of your life. Today’s youth changed five jobs in as many years at times. 

Moreover, many previously unheard of professions would surface every few years. When he graduated, there were no social media managers, digital marketeers, product managers or even data scientists. Now, these were all over the place. “Life long learning as a concept was taking some kind of beating”, adds he.

By the time Mayank met Ronnie Screwala in Mumbai, who was done with Disney and UTV and looking at what next, his thoughts were crystallized on where he wanted to be. Screwala listened and slept over the matter for a few months. But for all practical purposes, UpGrad was born at this meeting in September 2014.

It took a few months of to-ing and fro-ing and by March 2015, UpGrad had taken its first steps into the world of university education. At the time, the organization had four founders with their own funding. In the initial phase, the team designed its platform in house and started targeting students. According to Screwala, the fact that UpGrad is self-funded adds to its strength as the business is not driven by the ambitions and motivations of its funders but has the freedom to shape itself as it deems best.

But initially the going was harder than anticipated as online degrees were a relatively new animal in India itself. While overseas both Coursera and edX had made some dent through their massive open online courses, the Indian market was relatively untouched. It was only in 2018, the government amended UGC rules and regulations to permit Indian universities to offer their courses and degrees entirely online.

That’s how UpGrad’s own trajectory was determined as a consequence. In the first five years – and till 2020 - the platform’s focus stayed almost entirely on working professionals where their learners were already earning between Rs 5-12 lakh annually. The most popular courses are in data science, an MBA and courses in digital marketing. Although the duration may vary widely from 3 months to 24 months, the average course is one year and costs roughly Rs 1 lakh (although courses do cost up to Rs 3-4 lakh too). Almost 7,50,000 students have completed a course or are currently enrolled in one.

Like for many other ed-tech platforms, COVID-19 has come as a disguised blessing – enrollments, activity and interest have seen a spike as with all online learning – for UpGrad the pandemic has set it on a new course, one that it always wanted to embark on but had not yet reached out to. This vast explored territory of close to 35-40 million learners in India is where it is now taking baby steps. Soon after the lockdown was announced, UpGrad started working with O.P Jindal Global University –who had little experience with offering their courses online and have launched an executive MBA and executive LLM. The online platform now has over 1000 employees and expects to cross an annual revenue of Rs 700 crore this year.

But even as UpGrad takes its first steps into previously unchartered waters, it wants to carve a niche in the online space where the education on offer tackles three factors that often result in a student failing to learn. One, like with anything else, online learning needs discipline and a push for learners to actually learn. “It’s a bit like a mother needs to force her children to eat green, healthy vegetables” explains Mayank. Very few students are self motivated enough to perform to their maximum potential in a purely online offering. To overcome this, UpGrad has now built up a base of 1000 mentors who are paid by the platform to work with each student and push him or her to achieve their fullest. This is further compounded by the anonymity of an online course. It is easy to get in but almost as easy to get out. 

The founders also argue that the problem with education is not just providing the right content but the professor or the teacher delivering the lecture must be able to pique one’s interest. “The lesson needs to end a bit like a serial with a cliffhanger”, argues Mayank, saying that just high quality content without the human touch cannot suffice. The student’s interest needs to be piqued in a manner that he awaits the next lecture.

This, he and his co founders, believe will be the differentiator between UpGrad and other similar products both within the country (here Ashoka-X is expected to come up soon) and outside of it (Cousera and edX). The human touch cannot be wished away, no matter which juncture humankind finds itself at.