CAMPUS ABROAD

Dr. C B Chellakumar, Ph. D, Litt.D, is the Chairman and Managing Trustee of Campus Abroad, who are education counsellors and promoters for students wanting to study abroad. Chellakumar, is certainly 'the' man to speak to if one is thinking of ‘studying abroad’.  The owner of two Master degrees, one in English Literature and another in Business Administration and a Ph.D in Education, he has been promoting overseas education programmes for over two decades now and has overseen the admission of hundreds of students to Universities across the world.  He certainly deserves to be called a pioneer in Chennai as far as ‘providing service to students seeking to study abroad’ goes. 

I started a centre for education, where I got more people enquiring about how to join Universities abroad than for the courses that I was organising.  At that time a friend from Canada, with whom I had done my Ph.D, recommended my name to one of the top schools in Canada and they invited me to promote their courses and their schools to students aspiring to study abroad.  It was then that I decided to go full time into it.  At that time they offered me money to promote their courses but it was not till after a few years that I saw profit.  From 1980 to 1990 we started to charge students for our services.  In 1989, the Australian Universities were amalgamated and they started promoting their Universities themselves.  My own experience as a foreign student has also helped in shaping Campus Abroad’s vision. 

When I started there were just a few people doing these consultancy services in India, I was the first to go full time into it.  All the others were doing it as a part time kind of thing and many left it after a few years, while I have been doing this since I started in 1978.  In the beginning there was some hesitation, when the concept was new but since then people have become aware and the concept of a consultant service like ours has become very popular.  Even the Government of India has endorsed this.  In fact a few years back the Education Corporation of India Ltd., also entered into this but were not very successful. 

As far as the difference in awareness goes, in the city the awareness is quite high.  My aim is to enable students from the economically weaker segments of society to pursue foreign studies.  For this purpose I started a club called the Campus Abroad Club in the late 80’s, through which I hoped to reach out to students in suburban areas and to create awareness.  I priced the membership at Rs.100/- per year for an individual member. But this plan did not work out well, and I lost a few lakhs because I had invested quite a large amount of money in printing brochures and publicity.  I had a membership of only about 80 – 125 in the first year, while I was expecting 1000.  This made the plan economically unviable, so I had to drop it.

Nowadays there is so much of information available on the net, e-assistance I would call it.   But I would still recommend students to visit reputed consultants and make use of their services.  Let me justify, why I say this.  No University will talk about their weakness on their website or brochures. There will be some fine print, which a student may not be able to see. 

So what will happen is, if a person who is not academically strong, takes admission in a top school he would not be able to cope with it. On the other hand, if an academically strong student gets admission into a mediocre school his talent is wasted.  And if they happen to get admissions from five different Universities they will be confused about which one to choose. 

The downside of it is that there are also consultants who misguide students for the sake of money.  That is why I stress that a student should approach a consultant of good standing.

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