With the cut-off marks for admissions rising, it is hard to know what genuine consolation to give to thousands of disappointed students. We can say to them: don’t interpret your inability to get into a college of your choice as your personal failure. It is our collective failure. Obdurate politicians, control-freak bureaucracies, insecure academics, ideas of social justice conceived in bad faith, the poverty of our imaginations, and our preference for control over freedom, levelling over distinction, have all conspired to ensure that you get very few choices. Consequently, that half an extra mark seems life-defining. Even good results are interpreted as failures. What should be a time for great exuberance, begins on a note that somewhere life’s prospects have already been compromised. We can say to them: there is a paradox even at the heart of the good institutions. The students are exceptional, the faculty relatively poor. If students come out well, it is, few exceptions apart, because they are self-taught. There are some exceptional teachers but, for the most part, even our premier institutions do not have the faculty their students deserve. This is not much of a consolation, but at least it gives you a second chance. You will have to arrange for your own learning in the truest sense of the term anyway, with the help of your peers; institutions will define you less than you think. At least an expanding economy will give you a range of opportunities previous generations never had.

Our metrics of talent and merit at this stage of admissions are perhaps too constricted. It might be liberating not to be trapped by them entirely. One should not minimise the disappointment of not getting into one’s top-choice institution; brand names do matter. On the other hand, the course of life and the structure of opportunities will be a lot more variegated than you think at this moment. It is heretical to say this, but there is often a sense in which students at the very top are not necessarily more interesting than the second or third lot. They might have the safety of the brand name behind them, an assurance that doors will open for them more easily, but as Montesquieu famously said, security often breeds timidity as well. Will they have the capacity for risk and invention that you have? They may scamper along a well-laid road, but you might do something more precious: make a road simply by walking on your path.

... contd.