The Economy of YouTube JEE Coaching
In April of 2014, a college dropout from an Engineering school in Kanpur decided to move back to his home in Allahabad. Having taught tuitions previously as a child as a way to garner an extra income for his family, he decided to return to his roots as a teacher and join a coaching center. In two years, he had single-handedly revolutionized JEE Coaching In India.
Alakh Pandey is the founder of PhysicsWallah, a YouTube channel that offers lessons on the entire JEE syllabus for free. With over 8 million subscribers on YouTube and 1 million followers on Instagram, the channel has become such a success that it has since also been developed into an app, now offering full-fledged coaching at a significantly lower cost than traditional institutes like FIITJEE and BYJUs do.
JEE is the engineering entrance exam that is written by over 12 lakh high-school students every year. In India, Engineering and Medicine are considered highly reputed career paths, and so millions of students are pushed into the stream every year. YouTube JEE coaching, hence, is integral to our education system — it offers students from less developed socioeconomic backgrounds a chance at attending the best engineering schools in India. It offers them the opportunity to dream.
PhysicsWallah, however, is one of many YouTube channels that offer academic support to Indian students preparing for college entrance exams. Our education system may be flawed but institutes like such offer relief to students by allowing them to watch and re-watch lessons as much as they like. The biggest reason this differs from other ed-tech companies in the same space is that PhysicsWallah’s approach to teaching is different — they have always prioritized equitable access to education over their profit, unlike other ed-tech companies.
Unsurprisingly, this is a huge market. The Indian ed-tech space is in general a booming area, but this very niche space of YouTube entrance exam coaching is huge, too. This, of course, includes not only preparation for the Engineering entrance exam, JEE, but also for the medical entrance exam, NEET, as well as the Civil Services entrance exam, UPSC. In fact, it even extends to general 12th-grade final exam preparation.
PhysicsWallah is India’s 101st unicorn, with the company being valued at $1.1 billion. Alakh Pandey’s method of teaching is so highly regarded that Unacademy, another ed-tech giant, offered him INR 75 crore to quit and join them — an offer that Alakh Pandey refused, driven by his belief that education should be accessible to all, something that Unacademy’s high costs fail to represent.
In the Fiscal Year 2022, PhysicsWallah earned a revenue of INR 350 Crore, a close competitor to Unacademy’s INR 398 Crore in FY2021. It’s important to note, however, that Unacademy spends almost INR 411 Crore on advertisements, while PhysicsWallah spends close to nothing.
PhysicsWallah has grown most significantly during the pandemic, when students were shut away in their homes with high levels of anxiety and stress preying on them. The pandemic was an extremely uncertain time for high-school students — exams that determined their whole careers (and hence lives) kept getting postponed and pushed. Most YouTube education coaching channels were quick to take notice (and advantage) of this, PhysicsWallah alike. In the last two years, they have expanded to give birth to “CommerceWallah”, “PW Telugu”, “NCERTWallah”, “PW Bangla”, “DefenceWallah”, and several other subsidiary YouTube channels with their respective coaching resources on the PhysicsWallah app. It’s interesting to note, however, that their popularity doesn’t seem to be diminishing now that things have started to open up. They seem to still be expanding at the same rate they were during the pandemic. Perhaps the pandemic was just the stroke of luck they needed to get themselves noticed by their target audience.
One of PhysicsWallah’s most significant sources of income include their post-session contributions, wherein students have access to all their learning material on YouTube at first, and then can later make a monetary contribution if they find use from the same. Most students go into PhysicsWallah not knowing what to expect, and then are delighted with their course material. Hence, post-session contributions are large and usually come from college students or college graduates, who often reason that PhysicsWallah’s lessons helped them get into the college of their dreams. The reason this money comes from college students and/or graduates is that students prefer to use their own money instead of relying on their parents to make the contribution for them. In that sense, PhysicsWallah makes a long-term investment into the education and lives of its students — an investment that reaps its benefits even years into the future.
The question we should be asking, however, is why we, as a nation, must rely on privately-owned coaching centers like this one (with an obvious care for equal and equitable access to education) for quality education and coaching for entrance exams to chase after some false sense of artificial scarcity of enough seats at good colleges. Why are the seats at reputed universities not being built at the same rate as our population? Where is our ever-growing youth population supposed to study? The longer this goes on, the worse the quality of education becomes for our engineers, and the more unemployable our engineers become. As of 2019, almost 8 in 10 engineers are unemployable — a concerning statistic.
Money-hungry ed-tech giants will continue to force desperate parents of middle- and high-school kids to take out loans and EMIs for their children’s coaching with false and misleading marketing. PhysicsWallah is the silver lining of a dark cloud of elitist education that consistently keeps out those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. It helps to ask why we, as citizens of the world’s largest democracy, are still relying on citizen-run initiatives to survive and get through our otherwise horribly built and executed education system.
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Writer: Tara Awasthi
Editor: Priyanka Gore
