My child will become an astronaut, a doctor, or an engineer. Most of us have heard some version of this growing up, sitting at a dinner table while relatives made plans for a future that was not yet ours to decide.
For millions of families across India and Africa, this is not just dinner table talk. It is a blueprint. A promise. Sometimes a burden.
The love behind it is real. Nobody doubts that. But somewhere between the dream and the application portal, something gets lost. The conversation about what happens if it does not go to plan never quite makes it to the table.
The study abroad conversation almost always focuses on the positives. The right course, the right destination, the transformation that awaits on the other side of an offer letter.
What it rarely addresses is what happens when things do not go to plan, when a visa is refused. When the dream university says no.
When an application is put on hold despite months of careful preparation, these are real struggles students often face, and the best thing anyone can do is prepare for them.
According to Frontiers in Public Health’s 2025 report, a school-based survey of 1,426 students found that 74% reported high levels of academic stress, with parental expectations identified as one of the primary contributing factors.
PubMed Central research further confirmed that competitive entrance examinations are driving anxiety, insomnia, and in severe cases, self-harm among Indian adolescents.
These are not outliers. They are the lived reality of students who have spent their entire lives being told that failure simply is not an option.
The pressure does not ease once students reach university either. According to the Healthy Minds Study conducted between 2024 and 2025, across 135 US colleges with over 84,000 respondents, 33% of students experience moderate to severe anxiety and 17% report severe depression. And those are the students who made it through the door. The ones who did not are not counted in any dataset.
When rejection comes, the decision-making that follows is rarely calm or strategic,” says Sonal Kapoor, Global Chief Business officer at Prodigy Finance.
“Students rush, apply to whichever university will still accept them, and fall into the hands of agents who charge significant fees and deliver very little. They accept placements at institutions they were never excited about simply because something felt better than nothing in a moment of panic. This is exactly the problem. While early planning can help you study abroad, students who are left behind still need to choose carefully.If you rush, you may end up in the wrong university or with the wrong consultant who delivers very little.
For Indian and African students, the pressure is never just personal. It carries the hopes of an entire family, sometimes an entire community.
Sonal adds that this dimension of the student journey is one of the most underacknowledged in the entire industry.
“Many of our students, and students globally, carry this baggage of doing something not only for themselves but for their families. It is too much pressure from the very start. My advice is to focus on your goals first. Choose a well-ranked university, study well, build your future, and then think about what you can give back.
The drive to make your family proud is good. Overly stressing it from day one creates a level of emotional pressure that becomes very difficult to manage once you actually get abroad, she said.
The Global Chief Business Officer at Prodigy Finance, stated that though this has been positive, year-on-year comparisons and the latest reports still confirm that much more needs to be done.
According to the Healthy Minds Network’s 2025 report, severe depression among college students has dropped to 17% from 23% in 2022, suggesting that with the right support systems in place, there is hope.
“This is positive news, and compared to previous years, we are moving in a better direction. But the work is not over. Students still need to be searching for study abroad opportunities in the right places, through credible forums, verified counselors, and trusted platforms,” she added.
