According to a new poll, more than 70% of Indian students who want to study abroad are willing to pick hybrid programmes to save money in the post-pandemic scenario. According to the survey, which included over 4,000 overseas education aspirants as respondents, 66.8% of students agreed that the latest wave of the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on their plans to study abroad.

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"72 percent of students have opted for the hybrid-mode (part online/part offline degrees) to cut down the cost of education without sacrificing the quality of education," according to a poll performed by The WorldGrad, a tech-enabled foreign education platform. This is a huge increase from only a few months ago, when it was just 55%.

"The current pandemic has had a crucial influence in the aforesaid trend," according to the poll. It stated: "66.8% of students acknowledge that the ongoing epidemic has had an influence on their plans to study abroad. Because of safety worries, many parents were hesitant to send their children overseas at this time. The third most significant consideration for picking a place for studies was, unsurprisingly, how destination nations handled COVID-19."

The United States was voted the most popular abroad education location by Indian students (41%). Canada (21%) came in second, followed by Australia (18%) and the United Kingdom (17%). 

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"This represents a shift in trend in favor of two countries, the United States and Australia," according to the survey, "both of which had fallen out of favor among international students during the pandemic." 

It also found that at least 58% of the students had just a rudimentary awareness of the visa requirements for studying abroad.

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The pandemic is to blame for this disparity, which has pushed governments to revise their policy several times. The study "highlighted information asymmetry, which has been an obvious and crucial consequence of the epidemic," according to the report.