Punjab has a large private higher education sector built since the 2000s, including some of the largest private universities in India by enrolment, concentrated along the Jalandhar to Chandigarh corridor.
They recruit heavily from outside Punjab, particularly from the north-east, Bihar, Jharkhand and Jammu and Kashmir, and from abroad, and their campuses are among the largest employers in their districts.
Alongside them a much larger number of small private engineering and management colleges opened in the 2000s and a substantial proportion have since closed, because Punjab's own students now go abroad for the degree instead.
The IELTS and study-abroad sector is the other half of the same economy.
Punjab therefore has an education sector that imports students from poorer Indian states and exports its own to richer countries, and the flows barely touch each other.
The state's public universities, Punjabi University, Guru Nanak Dev University and Panjab University, have been in financial difficulty throughout the period in which the private sector expanded.
The model is scale. One campus can hold thirty thousand students in its own hostels, with its own buses, hospital, shops and power, and the fee is the entire revenue because there is no grant behind it. That is a business with an admissions cycle rather than an institution with an endowment.
The coaching centres are the visible end of the same thing. Every town on the Jalandhar road has a row of them with the same photographs of Toronto in the window, and the cost of the coaching, the test, the agent and the first year abroad is what a family borrows against land to pay.
The quality is uneven and the regulation is light. What they have unambiguously done is make higher education a large industry in a state whose public universities cannot pay their staff.