In India’s education discourse, scholarships are often spoken of with a sense of finality. Fees paid, barriers removed and futures unlocked. The assumption is neat and reassuring: that once financial access is secured, merit and effort will do the rest. But the evidence from classrooms, campuses and hostels across the country suggests otherwise. For a large proportion of first-generation learners, scholarships are not a bridge to opportunity so much as an incomplete map—useful, but insufficient to navigate unfamiliar terrain.
This gap between intent and outcome deserves closer attention, especially as India expands its scholarship architecture in pursuit of higher enrolment, equity and social mobility.
Access is not the same as capability
India has made measurable progress in widening access to education. Enrolment rates at the secondary and higher education levels have improved, and public and private scholarship schemes now reach millions of students. However, access alone does not translate into success. Dropout rates among first-generation learners remain stubbornly high, particularly at transition points—after Class 8, after Class 10 and during the first year of college.
The reason lies not in a lack of aspiration, but in a mismatch between what scholarships cover and what students actually need. Fees are only one component of educational participation. Equally critical are academic preparedness, language confidence, institutional navigation, mental well-being and a sense of belonging—factors that rarely appear in financial ledgers but decisively shape outcomes.
Economists have long argued that education should be viewed not as an input, but as a capability. Without the conditions that allow students to convert access into achievement, scholarships risk becoming symbolic gestures rather than engines of mobility.
The invisible barriers first-generation learners face
For students whose parents have never completed formal education, entry into secondary school or college is often accompanied by profound uncertainty. Administrative processes—forms, deadlines, documentation—can become obstacles in themselves. Academic culture, particularly in English-medium institutions, demands linguistic and social fluency that many students have not had the chance to develop.
Beyond the classroom, family pressures exert a constant pull. Economic precarity means that education competes with the immediate need to earn. Girls, in particular, face additional constraints: household responsibilities, concerns around safety, early marriage and the persistent undervaluing of their education.
Mental health stressors compound these challenges. Feelings of inadequacy, isolation and fear of failure are common among scholarship recipients who find themselves in environments far removed from their social realities. When these pressures go unaddressed, financial support alone cannot prevent attrition.
What the data quietly tells us
National surveys and independent studies increasingly point to this pattern. Research on higher education retention shows that students from marginalised backgrounds are more likely to drop out despite receiving financial aid. International evidence mirrors this finding: scholarships that combine monetary assistance with mentoring, academic support and psychosocial care consistently outperform those that do not.
In India, however, evaluation frameworks continue to prioritise disbursement over outcomes. Success is measured in terms of funds allocated or beneficiaries reached, rather than retention, completion or post-education trajectories. This narrow accounting obscures the role of non-financial support in determining whether scholarships fulfil their purpose.
Scholarships as systems, not transactions
Reframing scholarships as systems rather than transactions changes the policy conversation. It shifts the focus from how much money is given to how support is structured around the learner.
Non-financial interventions that matter include:
- Academic mentoring to address learning gaps and build confidence
- Language and communication support, especially in English-dominant institutions
- Psychosocial counselling to manage stress, identity conflict and anxiety
- Peer networks that reduce isolation and foster belonging
- Family engagement, particularly for girls, to sustain consent for continued education
- Institutional hand-holding to navigate examinations, internships and placements
These elements are not add-ons. They are integral to the conversion of access into capability.
The cost of ignoring non-financial support
When scholarship design overlooks these dimensions, the consequences are predictable. Students disengage quietly, often without formal withdrawal. Institutions interpret dropout as lack of merit or motivation. Policymakers respond by tweaking eligibility criteria or increasing allocations, without addressing the underlying causes.
The result is a cycle of partial success. Scholarships expand enrolment at the front end but fail to deliver mobility at the back end. For a country seeking to harness its demographic dividend, this is a costly inefficiency.
Learning from integrated models
Civil society organisations working at the grassroots have long recognised these gaps. Their experience suggests that sustained engagement, rather than one-time support, is what enables students to persist.
Smile Foundation’s education programmes illustrate this approach. Under its Mission Education initiative, scholarships are embedded within a broader framework that includes remedial learning, mentoring, health support and community engagement. This integrated model recognises that educational disadvantage is rarely singular. Addressing it requires attention to the social and emotional contexts in which learning occurs.
For adolescent girls, in particular, the Foundation’s interventions combine academic support with life skills, health awareness and family counselling. These measures help sustain participation during the years when dropout risks are highest. Crucially, the focus is not merely on keeping students enrolled, but on enabling them to imagine and plan for futures that education can realistically support.
Implications for policy and CSR
As India’s corporate sector increases its investment in education through CSR, the design of scholarship programmes warrants careful reconsideration. Too often, CSR-led scholarships mirror public schemes in focusing narrowly on financial assistance, driven by the imperatives of scale and reporting simplicity.
There is an opportunity here to do better. CSR initiatives, less constrained by bureaucratic rigidity, can pioneer models that integrate mentoring, academic support and mental health services into scholarship design. These models can generate evidence that informs public policy, demonstrating that non-financial support is not a luxury but a necessity.
From generosity to effectiveness
India’s commitment to educational equity is evident in the proliferation of scholarship schemes. What remains uncertain is whether this commitment will mature from generosity to effectiveness.
Ensuring that scholarships succeed requires acknowledging an uncomfortable truth: that financial aid, while essential, cannot compensate for structural disadvantage on its own. The real work lies in building ecosystems of support that accompany students through the long and uneven journey of education.
This is not an argument for reducing scholarships but one for completing them.
A more honest measure of success
If India is serious about using education as a tool for social mobility, it must ask harder questions of its scholarship programmes. Not how many students were funded, but how many graduated with skills. Not how much money was spent, but what capabilities were built. Not how many forms were processed, but how many lives were meaningfully transformed.
The answers to these questions will depend less on budgets than on design. Scholarships that recognise the full spectrum of barriers faced by first-generation learners stand a far better chance of delivering on their promise.
The rest, however well-intentioned, risk remaining unfinished bridges.
