HOW COLLEGES WERE RANKED
With nearly 50,000 institutes for higher education, this 22nd annual edition of India Today Group’s ranking of best colleges in India intends to make critical career decisions simpler for aspirants based on rich information and data. The completely revamped methodology by Delhi-based research agency MDRA intends to set several milestones. For the objective ranking, MDRA carefully selected more than 112 attributes in each stream to provide the most comprehensive and balanced comparisons of colleges. These performance indicators were clubbed into five broad parameters—‘Intake Quality & Governance’, ‘Academic Excellence’, ‘Infrastructure & Living Experience’, ‘Personality & Leadership Development’ and ‘Career Progression & Placement’.
The colleges were evaluated based on the current year’s data. The ranking tables also give parameter-wise scores obtained by colleges to provide deeper insights into key aspects of decisionmaking by various stakeholders.
A step-by-step walkthrough of how the ranking was done
1) Desk review and experts’ opinion
An extensive desk review of MDRA’s database and secondary research was conducted to shortlist colleges in each streams. These were to have:
Full time, in-classroom courses Churned out a minimum of three passout batches till academic year 2017-18
Undergraduate programmes ranked for 12 streams of Engineering, Medical, Dental, Law, BBA, BCA, Hotel Management, Fashion Design, Architecture, Arts, Science and Commerce
Post-graduate courses ranked for two streams—Mass Communication and Social Work
A list of over 9,000 colleges fulfilling the above criteria was prepared and contacted directly.
2) Determination of weightages Experts were consulted to frame the parameters and sub-parameters pertinent to respective streams and their weightages
3) Objective survey Comprehensive, objective questionnaires were designed for each of the 14 streams. Colleges fulfilling the eligibility criteria were contacted to participate in the survey through multiple ways—formal invitation were sent along with the objective questionnaire; an objective questionnaire was put up on the websites of MDRA and india today to increase awareness; multiple e-mails, telephonic calls were made to remind colleges about timely participation; and followups were done to clarify any doubts related to participation or the questionnaire. As many as 988 institutions provided their institutional data along with voluminous supporting documents within the stipulated deadline. 4) Back-checking of objective data After getting the objective data from colleges, cross-checking of the information provided by them was done through available information and validation (scrutiny of supporting documents, past data, mandatory disclosure, telephonic check, confirmation through e-mails, website visits etc). In case of insufficient/ incorrect data, the concerned colleges were asked to provide complete, correct and updated information.
5) Physical audits (verification) were conducted to verify the objective data provided by the colleges. The experienced researchers of MDRA visited 115 colleges and thoroughly examined each aspect of the details provided by them. 6) A perceptual survey was carried out among 1,821 well-informed respondents (563 senior faculty members, 311 recruiters/professionals, 382 career accelerators and 565 final-year students) across 24 cities. Respondents were from:
North—Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Faridabad, Lucknow, Kota, Chandigarh and Ludhiana
West—Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore and Nagpur
South—Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kochi and Coimbatore
East—Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Patna and Raipur
National and zonal rankings were taken from them in their respective fields of experience and were given 75 per cent and 25 per cent weightages respectively. They also rated the institutes on a 10-point rating scale on each of the five key parameters.
7) Arriving at a combined total score While computing objective scores, it was ensured that aggregate data wasn’t the only one used; data was also normalised on the basis of number of students. Total scores arrived from objective and perception surveys were added in the ratio of 60:40 (for 11 professional courses) to get the total combined score, while a ratio of 50:50 was taken for academic courses.
A large team including researchers, statisticians, analysts and survey teams worked on this project from October 2017 to May 2018. The MDRA core team included Abhishek Agrawal (executive director), Abnish Jha (senior research manager), Shashikant Mishra (senior research executive), Rajan Chauhan (research executive) and Preeti Kashyap (assistant research executive).