THE BEST COLLEGES

New college-goers need look no further than the India Today-MDRA Survey to make an informed choice

College education in India is a serious investment for all stakeholders. The 2017 Value of Education report by an HSBC survey, which focused on 8,481 parents across 15 countries, found that Indian parents spent

a hefty $18,909 (over Rs 12 lakh) towards their children’s school and college education in tuition fees, books and transport. For a country with a per capita annual income of Rs 1,03,219, that’s significant. According to National Sample Survey 2014, private (out-of-pocket) expenditure on education for general courses increased from Rs 2,461 per student in 2007-08 to Rs 6,788 per student in 2014 (a 175.8 per cent rise). As many as 44.81 million—16.6 per cent male and 9.5 per cent female—Indian undergraduate students are too poor to pursue higher education.

It’s not difficult, then, to understand why aspiring students and parents seek out the best institutes. Which is also a prime driving force behind India Today Group’s annual college survey—to help students decide on the best colleges.

The process began in 1997 and, over the past two decades, has gone through a process of evolution. The constant

endeavour has been to improvise and add more values to the evaluation methodology. Continuing the legacy— the best colleges survey is in its 22nd year now—we have introduced some variations in our methodology (see accompanying page). We have commissioned a new agency—Delhibased Marketing and Development Research Associates (MDRA)—and added three new streams: architecture, dental and social work (in the last, we only consider institutes offering masters courses).

In our previous avatar, perceptual and factual scores got equal weightage (50:50). Over the years, we felt the firststage filtration of colleges based on perceptual score was unfair to emerging colleges, who may not score high in perception against traditional giants. So we introduced a major change in our methodology this year. After preparing a list of colleges from multiple sources, we sought factual data from them and simultaneously sent the list to experts for perceptual scores. The factual data provided by the colleges was thoroughly scrutinised. The final ranking was based on factual and perceptual scores—60 percent weightage was given to factual data and 40 per cent to perceptual score. Due to this change— not filtering colleges based on experts’ perception in the first stage—a much larger number participated in the process (nearly 1,000 colleges as compared to 259 last year). This resulted in many new entrants among the top 20 across streams. The changed methodology also warranted we not compare rankings with previous years.

The most significant drift was in engineering, which is a study in contradiction. This stream has some of the world’s best institutes in the form of the IITs while hundreds of engineering colleges across the country have failed to fill once coveted seats. In 201617, total intake capacity at undergraduate level was 1,571,220, while total enrolment was 7,87,127 (around 50.1 per cent). Engineering colleges have approached the AICTE to reduce intake by almost 1.3 lakh BTech and MTech seats from the new academic year, starting July. As per AICTE’s provisional data, 83 engineering institutes having 24,000 seats have applied for closure. Another 494 colleges have sought permission to discontinue some programmes. This would reduce the national intake by another 42,000 seats.

Under these circumstances, we had to be extremely careful in screening engineering colleges. Besides, there was the pet peeve of several emerging private engineering colleges—that they face unfair competition against legacy institutes such as IITs. Hence we segregated the engineering college rankings into two—government and private.

The importance and rise of private education is not restricted to engineering alone. According to the HRD ministry, 77.8 per cent colleges are privately managed (of which 64.2 per cent are privateunaided and 13.6 per cent are privateaided). The imbalance, however, lies in that private colleges cater to 67.3 per cent of the total enrolment, indicating that the government colleges are still taking higher loads than they should.

Our survey has also taken note of apprehensions over the high cost of education. Hence the new feature—return on investment (RoI) rankings of colleges. The RoI will help allay placement fears of students as well as give an idea of the quality of jobs (in terms of salary package) to be expected and where it stands in comparison to course fees. However, the RoI rankings don’t mean these are the best colleges, they only offer maximum return in terms of salaries offered against the course fee they charge. From the point of view of investment in college education, they are the most valuable.

There are some worrying indicators that the India Today GroupMDRA Best Colleges Survey 2018 has thrown up. Most colleges among the top 30, across streams, remain concentrated in the north and south. The number of top colleges from the east is abysmally low. This only substantiates findings of the All India Survey on Higher Education 201617, published in January this year. While college density—number of colleges per lakh eligible population—is the highest in Telangana (59), followed by Karnataka (53); Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal are at the bottom of the pile. The national average is 28.

Today, our Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in higher education is just 25.2 per cent (up from 10 per cent in 2004), compared to the US (86 per cent) and China (43 per cent). Onefifth of the colleges have enrolment figures of less than 100 students; only 4 per cent have enrolment of more than 3,000.

Although India is aiming for a GER of 30 per cent by 2020, it will still be behind global powers by huge margins. Higher government spending in education with stricter focus on quality management has to be the way forward. Hopefully, the unequal comparison will be an eyeopener, instilling an urgency the nation needs to show in this area. A case in point: in 201617, for lack of opportunities here, 190,000 Indian students spent Rs 44,000 crore in US colleges. The central government’s budget for higher education that year was less than Rs 30,000 crore.

A FIFTH OF ALL COLLEGES TODAY HAVE ENROLMENT FIGURES LESS THAN 100. INDIA AIMS TO HAVE A GROSS ENROLMENT RATIO OF 30% BY 2020, BUT IT WILL STILL LAG WAY BEHIND GLOBAL POWERS