Launched at the House of Commons, London, Great Place to Study is a global education data intelligence firm which rates universities and schools on the basis of Student Satisfaction Survey. It takes students’ feedback and converts it into useful analytics which in turn helps institutions understands their USP’s and capitalise on them.

Shekhar A Bhattacharjee, founder and CEO of the organisation, aims to create a transparent platform to make the student voice the utmost recognition for institutions. Excerpts:

Q. How did Great Place to Study begin?

Great Place To Study as an entity by Skill-Tree Knowledge Consortium was commissioned to articulate the future of discovering great schools and universities. We began with the journey of documenting the success stories of various schools and colleges in India and presented it cinematically through our partnerships with noted media houses.

This process has re-defined how an institute can communicate with millions of audience through simple storytelling. The second tool that we have developed was our rating programme based on students and parents feedback, which went on to become most appreciated product of Great Place To Study globally.

Like most of the other startups whose growth was depended largely on external funding, we continued to improve our products and organically grew from one single location with 3 people team to multi countries with growing team of 70+ people. Our product and commitment spoke for us and 300+ schools and colleges in last few years signed on to be rated and featured by us.

Q. Elaborate on the process in which the platform works.

Innovation is what we seek everyday in how we do things. Be it our product development, client servicing, outreach and communication. Our processes, from on-boarding an institute to either feature them in our various on-going media programme or rating them, we have our own designed cutting-edge methodology and mechanism. Technology plays a massive role in our daily life to run the show.

Q. What changes does the organisation wish to bring in the current education system?

The organisation’s rating programme has proved to be the most sought-after process/mechanism for schools and colleges to discover area of improvements and strengths through feedback.

The process is just not about the survey, it is beyond. It is about the art of asking questions, science of calculating it and blend of cutting-edge technology used to deliver it and high user experience to receive feedback.

Our mission is to bring visual content and transparent rating process as important tools for institute to communicate and engage with internal and external stakeholders. We want to build a global community of schools and colleges committed in delivering rich student experience in all facets of learning.

Q. What is the position of Indian education in the global platform? What should be done to improve it further?

There are multiple ways to evaluate an institute comparing with global counterparts. The good part is that being an emerging economy if we compare ourselves with other economies, we are the largest in terms of numbers.

But having said that, India is yet to become a ‘global destination’ for international students and to be in that arena, the government have to play a major role in branding India.

Secondly, we should focus on bringing back some education models and areas which we are known for, like architecture, cultural studies, design. This programme will attract international students to consider India.

Q. What are the factors considered while rating a particular university or school?

We focus on five important KPIs — Learning experience, life on campus, extracurricular activities, infrastructure and happiness index. Each KPIs have an average of 15 to 20 sub-indicators.

On receiving of 70 per cent feedback on each KPIs from students and parents, we do various other analysis like gender, class-wise, net promoter score and projective methods on happiness index. Culminating all the numbers generate the final score for an institute and are categorised on various Great Place To Study star ratings.

Q. What are your plans with the organisation five years from now?

Our third version of Great Place To Study has been under making for last two years and aimed at to be launched in March 2019. With the new tool, we are going to completely change the way student can discover his career, apply to our listed institutes, engagement and mentorship.

Likewise, for institutions the platform will change the art of enrolling students. Five years from now, we see ourselves operating in multiple continents helping students and institutions to discover and get discovered.

Q. Till now what are the most common complaints that you have received from students? How is the organisation working towards improving them?

Complaints are subjective it totally vary from the type of institutions. For example, all girls residential schools versus a community school student have different set of complaints.

As an organisation, we do such data mining every day. We have automated process to give institutions feedback on major area of concerns and give basic guidance on way to improve it. We haven’t stepped into advisory mode yet.