Academic Stress & Productivity Loss: The Unspoken Reality Of National Law Universities

After securing admission through one of India's toughest examinations (CLAT), students arrive at National Law Universities with the hope of entering an environment that matches the effort it took to get there. Their expectations typically revolve around a supportive and intellectually stimulating academic environment with a balanced workload.

Students look forward to participating in classroom discussions with professors who mentor them and classmates who challenge them, and a curriculum that helps them develop strong legal reasoning and critical thinking. They expect an academic curriculum that is structured and purposeful, designed to enhance learning rather than turning it into an endurance test. While they expect demanding coursework, they assume that it will be manageable and organised. They expect assignments, readings, and projects to contribute meaningfully to their learning rather than overburden them. After clearing a competitive exam, they hope for an academic system that values efficiency over chaos and rote learning. Also, many students expect law school will provide them opportunities to participate in clubs, sports, societies, and extracurricular activities in which they are successful, but in reality, students do not have the time to volunteer or participate in these events because of the academic rigour in these NLUs. Students assume that universities will prioritise their mental well-being by maintaining transparent communication, avoiding unnecessary workloads, and creating systems that are humane and student-friendly. They expect institutions to recognise that nurturing healthy and motivated learners is essential to producing capable lawyers for the nation and world.

While these institutions were envisioned as spaces of excellence and opportunity, they have increasingly become pressure cookers where many silently struggle. Despite entering with high hopes and expectations, many students quickly realise that life inside NLUs is sharply different from their expectations.¹ There are structural issues, resource gaps, and a culture of relentless academic pressure that shape their day-to-day experience and productivity.

When they join universities, instead of consistently engaging in and well-planned classes, many students encounter, lectures that focus more on completing the syllabus rather than encouraging deep understanding, limited individual mentorship due to faculty shortages and administrative burdens, a classroom environment where dialogue is uneven, and students struggle to participate meaningfully and a curriculum that is heavy on volume but does not carry a weight on clarity and understanding. This results in an academic culture that frequently rewards memorisation or last-minute performance rather than sustained learning, which is not helpful in the legal profession. The NALSAR study notes that “Certificates, accolades, and rankings dominate conversations, often sidelining genuine curiosity or intellectual exploration. A student's value can feel reducible to how many moots they've won or how prestigious their internship was, rather than the quality of their learning or the integrity of their thought”.² The assignments, projects, readings, court exercises and evaluations often accumulate without coordination between courses. In this kind of environment, students find themselves busy from morning to night, yet still feeling as if they have accomplished very little, because their attention is being pulled in too many directions at once. “With our 'focus' so fractured and divided among the many things we do, deep contemplation and serious focus on any one task remains a practical impossibility.”³ Students commonly face these problems, such as numerous deadlines announced simultaneously, short-notice academic tasks, assessment-heavy semesters where consistency has to be maintained, which results in pressure cycles, a pace that leaves little time for reflection and proper research. The promise of “rigour with structure” often turns into intensity without planning. Despite vibrant student communities, actual participation becomes difficult because academic demands consume most of the available time. Events, moots, fests, and committees put additional pressure on already occupied schedules; Physical and institutional infrastructure (sports facilities, activity spaces, counselling services) also varies widely between NLUs and is often inadequate and has a lack of maintenance. Students who arrive eager to grow outside the classroom frequently struggle to find the time and support to do so. A significant part of student frustration comes not from academics alone, but also from institutional systems that are often poorly aligned with student needs. Across many NLUs, the processes meant to support learning inadvertently create additional stress. Students frequently encounter inconsistent and delayed academic communication, which causes confusion around deadlines, exams, timetables, and course requirements; Limited or overstretched mental health resources, with counselling services that are either understaffed or often lack adequate care. Administrative decision-making, which prioritises procedural correctness over practical understanding, leads students to feel unheard and marginalised. Instead of experiencing a supportive institutional culture, students often feel compelled to adjust themselves to rigid systems, rather than seeing the systems evolve to sustain healthier academic lives.

The contrast between what students expect when they enter NLUs and what they actually experience reveals a deeper structural issue within India's premier legal education institutions. Students arrive prepared for intellectual exploration, balanced academic demands, and a campus culture that supports growth both inside and outside the classroom. Instead, many find themselves in navigating systems that rely heavily on endurance, unstructured planning and institutional rigidity. This gap is not merely an emotional or cultural disconnect; it shapes how students learn, how they engage with the law, and how effectively they prepare for the profession ahead. When academic pressure replaces meaningful pedagogy, when administrative processes overshadow empathetic learning, and when student well-being becomes secondary to institutional image, the core purpose of legal education is weakened.

While the NLUs were designed as centres of excellence, their pedagogy reveals a deeper structural failure when compared with global legal education standards. Heavily influenced by a colonial legacy, the Indian law curriculum remains rigidly focused on domestic theory and dominated by the lecture-based teaching model. This approach, documented in comparative studies such as those by NLU Delhi, frequently yields passive learning and a critical disconnect between abstract theoretical knowledge and the demands of practical legal skills. In sharp contrast, global institutions, particularly in the US and UK, employ the Case Method and interactive seminars to compel students to engage actively, solve problems, and think critically, thereby aligning with the demands of modern legal practice.⁴ This structural gap explains why many high-achieving NLU graduates willingly incur the financial burden of a foreign LL.M. degree (which can cost anywhere from ₹30 lakhs to ₹75 lakhs⁵). Their choice is less about prestige and more about securing a pedagogical environment that better cultivates the specialised knowledge and essential skills required for global corporate and policy careers, serving as a powerful testament to the fundamental gaps in the domestic NLU system. This comparison is not about idolising foreign universities; it simply highlights the reforms Indian institutions must begin to prioritise.

Recognising this mismatch is the first step toward reform. Bridging the gap requires NLUs to align their academic structures, communication practices, and support systems with the expectations they themselves create. Only then can these institutions truly embody the excellence they promise and cultivate lawyers who are not just resilient but genuinely equipped intellectually, professionally, and personally to contribute to the legal system in the country and the world.

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References: 

¹ Vaishali Singh & Harshit Bhaskar, Behind the Ranks: Navigating Mental Health Challenges in NLUs (HPNLU,2023), https://hpnlu.ac.in/PDF/ca8ca04f-ab1f-424e-899b-7aafad8cecc4.pdf.

² Singh And Bhaskar, supra note 1, at 1.

³ Shantanu Singh, A Perfection à la Self-Destruction: On the NLUs' Mental Health Malaise, Creative Arts, GNLU (Feb. 22, 2019), https://jurysoutblog.wordpress.com/2019/02/22/a-perfection-a-la-self-destruction-on-the-nlus- mental-health-malaise/.

⁴ M. Sridhar Acharyulu, Comparative Teaching & Research Pedagogy and Legal Education Reforms in India and China, NLU Delhi 72–80 (2023).

⁵ Samira Kohli, The High Cost of an LLM: Why Indian Law Students Are Going Abroad, Fin. Express, Aug. 10, 2024.