Beyond the Numbers: Rethinking Access to Education in Rural India
This summer, I had the opportunity to work with the Ekal Vidyalaya Foundation, a nonprofit focused on expanding access to education in rural and tribal communities across India. As someone who has spent much of my time at Wharton thinking about finance and economic development, I was interested in understanding a more fundamental question: what needs to happen at the community level for economic opportunity to exist in the first place?
Ekal offered me a unique perspective on that question. Its model is built around single-teacher schools serving communities where traditional educational infrastructure can be difficult to access. Over the course of my internship, I researched rural education initiatives and worked to better understand the efficacy and scalability of Ekal’s approach. My work involved synthesizing program-level insights, thinking about how to evaluate student access and retention, and examining how data could be used to better understand program outcomes.
One of the most interesting parts of the experience was realizing how different evaluating impact can be from evaluating a traditional business. In the classroom and through my previous experiences, I had become comfortable thinking about organizations through metrics such as growth, profitability, and returns on investment. At Ekal, the questions were different. How do you measure the value of giving a child access to education who otherwise might not have had it? How do you expand a program across communities with very different needs without losing what made it effective in the first place?
Working through these questions pushed me to think more carefully about the relationship between quantitative analysis and the people behind the numbers. Data could help identify patterns and inform decisions, but understanding local context was equally important. I came away with a greater appreciation for how difficult it is to design programs that are both scalable and responsive to individual communities.
My experience also broadened the way I think about economic development in India. Education does not exist in isolation: it intersects with digital access, health, gender, infrastructure, and ultimately economic mobility. Seeing those connections more closely helped me understand development less as a collection of individual problems and more as a system in which progress in one area can create opportunities across many others.
The Wharton Summer Internship Award gave me the flexibility to pursue an unpaid experience that was meaningfully different from the paths I had previously explored. It allowed me to apply the analytical skills I have developed at Wharton to a mission-driven organization while learning that not every important outcome fits neatly into a financial model. I leave the summer with a broader understanding of impact, a deeper appreciation for the complexity of expanding opportunity, and a perspective that I hope to carry with me wherever my career takes me.