How the Colleges were Ranked
With more than 42,000 institutes of higher education in India, this 26th edition of the India Today Group’s annual ranking of colleges intends to make it easy for aspirants to make critical career decisions based on a rich information base and data. Over the years, this ranking has become the gold standard for stakeholders such as recruiters, parents, alumni, policymakers, the general public and institutions. Since 2018, the survey has been conducted in association with reputed Delhibased market research agency Marketing & Development Research Associates (MDRA). For this year, work on the ground was done between January and June. Colleges were ranked across 14 streams— arts, science, commerce, medical, dental sciences, engineering, architecture, law, mass communication, hotel management, BBA, BCA, social work and fashion design.
To arrive at an objective ranking, MDRA carefully attuned more than 112 performance indicators in each stream to enable a comprehensive and balanced comparison of colleges. These indicators were clubbed under five broad parameters: ‘Intake Quality and Governance’, ‘Academic Excellence’, ‘Infrastructure and Living Experience’, ‘Personality and Leadership Development’ and ‘Career Progression and Placement’. In addition, there was an attempt to gauge how colleges prepared to handle the pandemic.
To give more realistic, relevant and accurate information, MDRA evaluated colleges based on current year data. The tables also give parameter-wise scores for deeper insights on key aspects of decision-making by various stakeholders.
The ranking was done in multiple steps...
➘ An extensive desk review of MDRA’s database and secondary research was conducted to prepare a list of colleges in each stream. Only those colleges offering full-time, in-classroom courses and that have had at least three batches pass out till 2021 were considered. Undergraduate courses were ranked in 12 streams, while postgraduate courses were evaluated for mass communication and social work.
➘ Experts with rich experience in their fields were consulted to frame the parameters and sub-parameters for various streams. Indicators critical to establishing the best colleges were meticulously determined and relative weights finalised. For fair comparison on year-onyear basis, weightages of parameters stayed unchanged from the past two years.
➘ Comprehensive objective questionnaires were designed for each of the 14 streams factoring in these performance indicators and were put up in the public domain—on the websites of india today and MDRA. MDRA directly contacted about 10,000 colleges fulfilling the eligibility criteria seeking objective data for verification. Attested hard and soft copies were sought and 1,614—55 more colleges than last year—eligible institutes submitted institutional data along with voluminous supporting documents within the stipulated deadline.
➘ On receipt of the objective data from participating colleges, MDRA verified the information. In case of insufficient/ incorrect data, respective colleges were asked to provide complete, correct and updated information.
➘ Perceptual survey of these colleges was carried out among 1,781 well-informed respondents (544 senior faculty members, 306 recruiters/ professionals, 382 career accelerators and 549 final year students) across 27 cities, divided into four zones.
North: Delhi, Noida, Ghaziabad, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Lucknow, Kota, Amritsar, Chandigarh, Ludhiana and Roorkee
East: Kolkata, Bhubaneswar, Guwahati, Patna and Raipur
West: Mumbai, Pune, Ahmedabad, Indore, Panaji and Nagpur
South: Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad,
Kochi and Coimbatore
➘ National and zonal rankings were taken from them in their respective field of experience and given 75 per cent and 25 per cent weightage respectively. Institutes were also rated on a 10-point rating scale on each of the five parameters.
➘ While computing objective scores, aggregate data was not used alone; data was normalised on the basis of the number of students for fair comparison. The total scores arrived from objective and perception survey were added in the ratio of 60:40—for 11 professional courses—while a ratio of 50:50 was taken for academic courses—arts, science and commerce—to get the final combined score.
➘ A large team of researchers, statisticians and analysts worked on this project. The MDRA core team, led by executive director Abhishek Agrawal, included project director Abnish Jha, assistant research manager Vaibhav Gupta, research executive Aditya Srivastava and executive EDP Manveer Singh.