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Volume XLIII Number 23; For the week
May 29-June 4, 2018, published on every Friday
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
O
ur endeavour at the india today
Best Colleges Survey, now in its
22nd year, has been to provide
readers with all the inputs to
make an informed choice from over
50,000 higher education institutes. With
this goal in mind, we have made our
methodology more stringent this year and
widened the net to include many more
colleges. We have included new entrants
among the top 20 colleges, across all
streams, and segregated rankings of
public sector and private sector engineer-
ing colleges. Reflecting the increasing di-
versity of career choices, we have included
architecture, dentistry and social work
streams this year. Our new survey part-
ner, Marketing & Development Research
Associates (MDRA), surveyed 988 col-
leges nationwide and visited 115 colleges
to verify ranking parameters.
It is of course difficult to talk about
colleges without raising an alarm about
the state of our higher education sector,
and here I’d like to cite the NITI Aayog’s
three-year action agenda released last year.
India’s Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER), the
number of students in a particular grade,
has risen over the past five years to 25.2
per cent, but is still way below the global
average of 44 per cent. A 2016 assessment
of 150,000 engineering graduates found
only 18 per cent were employable in the
software sector in a functional role, only
41 per cent in non-functional business
process outsourcing and only 4 per cent
in software engineering start-ups. Large
sections of India’s workforce have insuf-
ficient job skills because only 2.3 per cent
have undergone formal skill training as
opposed to 52 per cent in the US and 96
per cent in South Korea.
Alarming facts when you consider
Indians spend over Rs 12 lakh on coll-
ege education, way above the per capita
income of Rs 1.11 lakh. With this in mind,
our Best Colleges Survey has introduced
new features like a return on investment
(RoI) ranking to highlight the quality of
jobs (in terms of salary package) one could
expect after passing out from a college and
how it compares to course fees paid.
The survey, put together by Senior
Associate Editor Kaushik Deka, has found
interesting facts. The alarming slide in the
engineering stream continues unabated.
Once the most sought-after stream, today
over 50 per cent of engineering seats are
going empty with colleges approaching the
Our May 22, 2017 cover
AICTE to slash over 130,000 seats. There
are also some worrying indicators—most
colleges continue to be concentrated in the
north and south. The number of colleges
in the east, including densely populated
states like Bihar, Jharkhand and West
Bengal, is abysmally low.
Although India aims to attain a GER
of 30 per cent by 2020, it will still trail
behind global powers like China (42 per
cent). Higher government spending in
education, with stricter focus on quality
management, is the way forward. Just
to give you an idea, the Rs 44,000 crore
Indian students spent in 2016-17 to study
in just one country, the US, outstripped
the Rs 30,000 crore the Centre allocated
for higher education this year. The reasons
for this exodus are not far to see. India seri-
ously lags behind when it comes to higher
education. Just three institutions—IIT
Delhi, IIT Bombay and IISc Bengaluru—
feature in the list of top 200 universities in
the world. These are appalling figures for a
country on the cusp of a demographic and
economic revolution. India will become
the world’s youngest country by 2020 with
an average age of 29 years and the world’s
third largest economy by 2028. Not
reforming our moribund education system
could squander this rare opportunity.
It’s worth remembering that no coun-
try has become a developed country with-
out a robust education system. Sadly, our
primary education system is in a worse
mess than higher education. It requires
vision, commitment and dedication to
reform our educational institutions. It
should be our topmost priority as it would
be the greatest gift we can give to future
generations.
(Aroon Purie)
J U N E 4, 2 018
INDIA TODAY
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