With admission into highly subsidised top tier Centrally funded universities and elite IITs, IIMs, NITs, likely to become more difficult because of loss of learning in the pandemic year, the next option is best private colleges and universities which provide near equivalent higher education – Dilip Thakore writes about EW India Higher Education Rankings 2021-22. With schools, colleges and all education institutions having suffered unprecedented lockdown conditions for over a year since mid-March 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, and date of school-leaving class XII exams still uncertain, admission into undergraduate colleges is an issue clouded with uncertainty for the estimated 16 million children in higher secondary education. If at all class XII board exams are held within the next three months, they are likely to lack the rigour of previous years. Ditto for students in undergrad programmes pressing on for higher studies. What all this portends for the future of India’s higher education institutions, the Indian economy and already low-productivity India Inc, is a matter for grim speculation for which the country’s neta-babu brotherhood with a stranglehold on Indian education — especially higher education — has little time. Nevertheless, it’s clear that admission into the country’s few hundred top-ranked colleges and elite institutions such as the IITs, IIMs, NITs is likely to become more difficult than ever because most of them demand sky-high cut-offs in higher secondary school-leaving examinations or high scores in rigorous entrance exams. Therefore with admission into relatively qualitative, subsidised public institutions restricted to a fraction of school and college leavers, the next best option for the vast majority is the country’s top-ranked private colleges and universities which tend to provide near equivalent higher education, albeit at relatively high tuition prices. Indeed informed public and academic opinion is almost unanimous that the country’s 25,375 private colleges and universities that educate 70 percent of youth in higher education, provide better academic programmes, faculty and infrastructure than state government institutions filled with ill-qualified faculty, whose prime qualifications are caste and kinship ties with state politicians and bureaucrats. Therefore, since 2013 EducationWorld has been commissioning nationwide surveys to evaluate and rank the country’s best privately-promoted colleges and universities to enable school leavers and undergrads to choose higher education institutions that don’t receive adequate coverage and examination in mainstream media. “Rankings are a very important service for promoting institutional excellence and improving quality of teaching, learning and research. They also facilitate international collaborations and perhaps most important, enable students to make informed choices for attaining their academic aspirations. They also motivate education institutions to formulate sound policies and develop robust teaching and research ecosystems. Reliable and credible institutional ranking league tables provide students diverse and transparent information to make study choices based on parameters of their interest,” opines Dr. C. Raj Kumar, founding vice chancellor of the new genre privately-promoted O.P. Jindal Global University, Sonipat (JGU, estb.2009). Evidently Dr. Raj Kumar, an alum of Delhi, Oxford and Harvard universities, is totally convinced about the vital importance of academic rankings. JGU…
