Foreign fad: Colleges start IELTS, immigration centres

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, March 12

As the Covid-19 failed to deter foreign crazy Doaba students from keeping their dreams on hold, various institutes have started to cherish their desires of settling abroad. They know that it’s difficult to hold them after completion of their school education.

In order to keep them busy, colleges from time to time have tried various methods to occupy youth for maximum time. While they initially started highlighting memorandum of understandings (MoUs) with foreign universities (half course in India and the second half abroad), the next attempt was to keep them occupied with short-term courses in air hostess training, aviation, nanny, physiotherapy, nursing and hotel management, among others, which have a good demand abroad.

Now, the institutes have begun offering on-campus IELTS coaching and most recently have even opened firms to facilitate immigration of students. “Certainly, this trend is not going to settle in any way and we have seen it all. So, we thought that instead of counselling and urging them to stay back by telling tales about successful Punjabis here, we have also jumped on the same bandwagon. Tomorrow, we are going to launch CT Global Education Services, which will be a study-based immigration services firm. To ensure that we are able to pull up the same kind of clientele, we are opening our office in the hub of such activities near the bus stand,” said Manbir Singh, managing director, CT Group of Institutes, which runs a university, chain of colleges and schools.

Asked how it would be different from hundreds of their counterparts in the market, Manbir said, “We will be more reliable and affordable. We will offer IELTS coaching. We will have ‘IELTS Plus’, which will have additional short-term skill training courses, including carpentery and hotel management for visa enhancement.”

Like the CT Group of Institutes, KMV College, Jalandhar, is also offering IELTS course for its students as well as outsiders. “We want students to remain busy and brush up their skills as long as they are with us. So, instead of attending IELTS coaching centres, we are offering them an in-house facility wherein one can attend classes during their free periods or after college hours. We have fully-trained dedicated IELTS faculty. In addition, we are also offering foreign language courses in French and Mandarin, which have a good demand,” said Madhumeet Kaur, Dean Student Welfare.

Talking about the foreign fad, she added that as regular college classes were allowed to resume post lockdown, it were largely the IELTS trainees who insisted for offline classes and were among the first few students to return to the campus.