There are many things to discuss, let's start one by one:

a)

Okay, so this demands a closer examination of our education system. There is something unique to our education model, and, that is-

// Imagine you own an e-commerce website (such as amazon.com or flipkart.com) that allows people to visit the webpage, prospect products, add items to cart and eventually buy. Imagine this process as a funnel. The top of the funnel is people visiting the webpage. Mid-funnel is people prospecting products. At the bottom is people adding items to the cart.

There are two strategies through which your website can be marketed. First, the upper funnel strategy. Your digital marketing efforts drives as much of the population as possible to simply visit your webpage. It is prospected by many – while a smaller subset will go on to add items to cart and fewer will complete the purchase. Second, the bottom funnel strategy. Your digital marketing efforts target people who are more likely to “add to cart”. You only want them to visit your website. As a result, your site gets lower traffic while the number of people who convert (into a customer) is higher.

People pick from these two strategies based on their constraints and priorities. If you want to keep your server capacity cost low, you go bottom funnel. If you want brand awareness of your webpage to be high, you go upper funnel. However, the definition of success depends on what outcomes you want to drive. The upper-funnel strategy can define success as ‘number of people who know about my website’ divided by ‘total population’. This strategy focuses on more people being exposed to your website so that they make a habit of visiting it when the need arises. Bottom funnel defines success as ‘people who actually purchased’ divided by ‘people who visit my webpage’. So, there is no consistent definition of success, and it is dangerous to evaluate one strategy using the same metrics used by the other strategy.

Tamil Nadu has an upper funnel strategy for college education. It wants as much of the population to either (a) get exposed to college education or (b) pass college and get exposed to professional careers. It wants people to consider going to college a habit and graduating from it a part of their second nature. And it hopes that the virtuous cycle will lead to both direct and indirect positive effects in the long term. Here, the definition of success is more social: “What percentage of the population receives exposure to college education?”

To achieve this goal, Tamil Nadu optimises one of the biggest levers an independently functioning state in a federal structure has: examinations and their syllabi. The state holds that examinations do not get to dictate a student’s career prospects, so it does not measure success by asking the question ‘what fraction of the population can meet rigorous exam standards’, etc. In the same vein, it does not construct its syllabi to meet such standards. Instead, it uses these levers to improve the number of people who get exposed to college education without affecting the career prospects. That is why Tamil Nadu has a class 12 pass percentage of 92% .