FROM THE EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
All the heated debate these days is about the radical transformation being imparted to India’s defence recruitment structure with the Agnipath scheme. But there’s another crucial field that is seeing a transformation that’s nothing short of epochal. That’s a college education. For decades now, July would bring to us news about maddeningly unreal cutoffs—inching ever closer to 100 per cent—that young aspirants had to match if they wanted to get into any of the colleges of repute. The race has always been tight for aspirants to get into the 42,000odd colleges that come under over 1,000 universities across the country. But this July, there comes an attempt to turn access to higher education into a more level playing field. Colleges under 89 universities, including all central universities, will admit students into undergraduate and postgraduate courses based on their performance in a Common University Entrance Test (CUET). The importance of the Class XII board exam—the biggest bogey for generations of youth who passed before this—has been considerably scaled down. CUET, which will be conducted by the National Testing Agency, comes as an urgent piece of reform in a sector that will build our human infrastructure. Although we haven’t seen it yet, the exam is thought of as an exercise that will evaluate the conceptual faculties of students—their ability to think logically, on their feet as it were, instead of just reproducing what they learnt by rote.
Crisis reshapes us as a society in ways we cannot always foresee. The peril our lives were cast into during the pandemic forced us into a spell of innovation that seems to have outlasted its original purpose—it’s as if every field of human endeavour is being touched by a transformational spirit. But perhaps nothing can qualitatively match what access to good college education means for the young—and, by extension, for us as a nation. This is where the 26th annual edition of the India Today Group’s ranking of colleges comes in, as a necessary life accessory for millions of young Indians—enabling them to make choices that can change their lives and, in the process, also inflect the evolution of our society. This issue will be the primary reference point for college aspirants as also for all other stakeholders—parents, institutions, policymakers, recruiters.
We at india today are keenly aware of the responsibility this brings on us, and no effort has been spared in ensuring that we match up to the rigour and solidity that being a gold standard should entail. Since 2018, this survey has been conducted in association with the reputed market research agency Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA). Their fifth edition with us brings us a fascinating picture of how the field of higher education has been evolving on the ground—even as policy now falls in step with it. Especially because the ambit of our survey has been expanding and now more fully reflects the ground. As many as 1,614 colleges participated in this exercise, submitting themselves to the only kind of review that’s worth its while—an independent public audit. That is 55 more colleges than last year and 626 more colleges than we had in 2018.
Our trusted methodology has been retained. The groundwork was done all the way between January and now. Luckily, the ebb in the pandemic allowed colleges to resume a normal life, even if in fits and starts. Executive Editor Kaushik Deka, who is in charge of the survey, says: “The pandemic may have kept teachers and students away from colleges for the past two years, but top institutes used this disruption as an opportunity to experiment with technological innovation for more expansive and effective pedagogy. That set the winners apart from the rest.”
We rank them across 14 streams—arts, science, commerce, medical, dental sciences, engineering, architecture, law, hotel management, BBA, BCA, fashion design, social work and mass communication. Undergraduate courses in 12, and postgraduate courses in the last two. Over 112 performance indicators have been accounted for in each stream, judged according to absolutely freshly collected data from this year, to provide comprehensive and balanced comparisons. These were clubbed into five broad parameters—‘Intake Quality and Governance’, ‘Academic Excellence’, ‘Infrastructure and Living Experience’, ‘Personality and Leadership Development’, ‘Career Progression and Placement’.
We have kept to some basic benchmarks. Only those colleges that offer fulltime, inclassroom courses and have groomed at least three passout batches till 2021 were considered. For a fair comparison on a yearonyear basis, the relative weightage of parameters remains unchanged since 2020. After consulting experts on how to frame the parameters and subparameters for different streams, objective questionnaires were designed for each stream. These were put up in the public domain—on the websites of india today and MDRA. MDRA then directly contacted about 10,000 colleges that fulfilled the eligibility criteria. The information they provided was independently verified, and crossmatched with data from a perceptual survey conducted among 1,781 wellinformed respondents—544 senior faculty, 306 recruiters/ professionals, 382 career accelerators and 549 finalyear students—across 27 cities.
The citywise and zonal comparisons offer us a tangentially troubling picture, though. The DelhiNCR region has 43 colleges in the top 10 ranks across all streams, 91 in the top 25 and 133 in the top 50. A dismal comparison, to illustrate how nonmetropolitan India fares: Coimbatore has 0, 3 and 40; Mangaluru has 1, 5 and 11; and Bhopal has 3, 6 and 9. Encouragingly, they also figure in the list of small towns that are emerging as college hubs, with a few colleges across streams that figure in the top 30. But even a specialisationbased analysis across streams exhibits that same skew towards Delhi. It has 6 of the bestperforming engineering colleges, 13 in arts, 16 in commerce, 15 in science, and 6 in medical education. The next best city in this survey, Bengaluru, puts only 3 in engineering, 5 in arts, 4 in commerce, 4 in science and 3 in medical. Although great progress has been made, India still needs to build more education capacity within a fair geographical spread. The next challenge is to maintain quality. No asset is more valuable for a country than a welleducated citizenry.