Punjab's engineering colleges expanded enormously from the 1990s, and a large share of their graduates left, first for the Gulf and the United States and then for Canada and Australia.
The pattern in the 2010s changed shape: rather than graduating and emigrating, students began going abroad for the degree itself, on study visas, with the family financing it by selling or mortgaging land.
That is a transfer of Punjabi agricultural capital into foreign university fees at a scale nobody has measured, and it is the single largest use of rural land sale proceeds in the state.
The private engineering colleges built in Punjab in the 2000s to serve the earlier pattern have been closing, because the students now go directly.
The IELTS coaching centre replaced the engineering college as the standard institution of a Punjabi district town, and did it inside fifteen years.
The colleges built in the 2000s were filled by fee-paying students and financed on the assumption that demand would hold. When admissions collapsed the buildings stayed and the courses stopped.
The study visa route sends a student abroad on a family loan against land, and the expectation is work rather than a degree. The course chosen is whichever one grants the permit.
Punjab's own institutions have not been expanded or funded to hold that outflow, and no policy has tried.