Abraham Lincoln, in his letter to Albert G Hodges on 4th April 1864, wrote: “I claim not to have controlled events, but confess plainly that events have controlled me.” Abraham Lincoln. What was true then remains true now but few would want to admit so. Instead, they would like to think and insist to have controlled the events. The tendency is a cognitive error called the illusion of control bias.
Elaborating on the idea and its implication, Ellen Langer, a renowned professor of social and clinical psychology at Harvard, articulates that the “expectancy of a personal success probability would be inappropriately higher than the objective probability.” Though all are afflicted by the phenomenon, the tendency is exceedingly widespread among Middle-class parents in India while making choices about higher education for their kids.
They leave no stone unturned to ensure that their children get good education up to the highest level. A good education is their only hope for children’s prosperity, family pride and their own security. They invariably go beyond their means to afford what they think is the best education for their offspring. They sacrifice their necessities and desires to save money to send them for coaching to qualify for entrance examinations, pay tuition fees and other charges and meet many other education-related expenses. Their solemn efforts trigger the illusion of control bias.
Most of them end up seeking education loans to cover the ever-rising cost of higher education, be it medical, professional, technical or even general. Most middle-class families are ineligible to get the benefit of the interest subsidy schemes and have no option but to borrow at market rates, which are often higher than the borrowings for car and housing loans. The amount of loan sought is invariably high enough to require them to furnish collaterals and guarantees. Thus begins the process of their indebtedness for the education and training of their children, for their sons in particular.
These are but a few examples of economic costs, which the middle class happily bears. Their expectations of gains blind them to the perils of the promise. In fact, they never weigh their decisions in economic terms and do no cost-benefit analysis. To them, education is a virtue in itself and must be afforded to their nearest and dearests. They rationalise their decision by invoking the proverbial ethos which assures that “paisa haath ki mail hai”, money is the grime of hand, meaning thereby that it is to be least valued as it keeps coming and going and one must have no qualms or a second thought to spend for a good cause and what could be a better cause than getting the best.
To these families, the present must be sacrificed for the future. The least they realise is that in adherence to this dictum, many of them are inadvertently not only signing away their present but also undermining their future. The economic consequences multiply as the choice of the institution and programme turns out to be far from being the best and then the cascading effects trigger. Denied placements and underemployment add to their woes as they lead to delays and defaults in the repayment of loan instalments. With interest on interest, liabilities pile up. Their hope dwindles and trauma sets in.
The specific challenge of a rational decision is exactly characterised by the fact that information about the conditions we must employ never exists in concentrated or integrated form, but rather as scattered fragments of inadequate and usually conflicting knowledge that all persons possess. To put it another way, it is an issue with the usage of information that has not been supplied to anybody in its entirety.
The tendency may be a result of several biases, such as a narrow range of experience, base-rate neglect and sample-size neglect. When a decision maker has a restrictive frame of reference from which to devise an objective approximation, a narrow range of experience bias frequently results. Base-rate neglect is making a choice based on a false sample size while an instance of sample-size neglect is a choice based on a small sample.
System neglect and probability neglect may as well be causes of the failure. The risk associated with the system is inescapable, and ignoring this fact is the phenomenon of system neglect.
Yet, these Middle-class parents may count themselves among the fortunate. Their children, particularly the sons, may not have brought the expected laurels or wealth but are by their side when they would need their children the most. As few want to remain unemployed, their children too would find something or the other sooner or later. They might make a living by selling tea, coffee and snacks or by peddling groceries or vending vegetables. A few of them may try their luck in startups. They would soon settle in their life, get married and provide parents with the priceless pleasure of playing with their grandchildren.
Educational decisions need not always go awry in economic terms. In a fairly large number of cases, children do as well as expected. They bring all accolades and plaudits and make their families proud. They get placed in the institutions of their choice and make more than what their parents had ever earned or even dreamt of. But they are seldom satisfied with their accomplishments. Success makes people all the more aspirational urging them to succeed all the more. The urge takes them farther from their homes till they find their dreamland, mostly in the west, north or down under.
They indeed love their parents and visit home periodically. Their visits are always a celebration, the talk of the town making their parents puffed and proud. They also sponsor their parents and finance their travel to their newfound land. As years go by, the visit and sponsorship become less frequent. They become busier with their own affairs, their spouse, and their children leaving them with little time to travel all the way just to see their parents and their home town, which in any case doesn’t look as good and enticing as before when they had not seen the world and experienced what it offers.
Technology does indeed come quite handy. The elderly parents eagerly learn, albeit with some difficulty, how to make video calls and chats. They can not only hear them but also see them walking and talking, though virtually. Each of such calls makes them long for another and sooner. The virtual visits fill them with unsaturated desires to see, touch and feel their children and grandchildren in life and blood. They realise that virtual interaction is no better than virtual and online education. Their values and love for their children tied their tongues to verbalise if they would have liked to study remotely.
That may not have provided them with the kind of opportunities that their in-person expensive education did, but that must have been quite convenient and affordable for the parents. But no Indian parent would ever say this to anyone, least to their own children. They were unwavering in their conviction that the present needs to be compromised for the future. They must remain equally firm the future must never be compromised for the past. Their children are the future and they themselves are already past their prime. They must live their lives.
Life is like a boomerang and comes back rebounding or ricocheting, rather rapidly. Most middle-class parents would admit that in their prime they had done to their parents exactly what they are experiencing themselves now. Their parents did everything within their means to see that their children succeed in their lives well. Most parents would realise that they too left their homes, even though their parents desired, albeit secretly, that they should remain by their side there in the village. This is probably all about progress and development.
Nicholas Taleb draws attention to the limitations of our ability to learn from the past. “When you look at the past, the past will always be deterministic, since only one single observation took place. Our minds will interpret most events not with the preceding ones in mind, but with the following ones. While we look at the past we know that history flows forward, it is difficult to realise we envision it backwards.”
Furqan Qamar, a former Advisor for education in the Planning Commission, is a Professor of Management at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Taufeeque Ahmad Siddiqui teaches in the Department of Management at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Views are personal.w