Accepting the validity of the argument that the overwhelming majority of the country’s estimated 39 million school-leavers enter arts, science and commerce undergrad colleges annually, C fore field personnel interviewed 946 college faculty and 824 final year students to rate and rank India’s Top 100 Arts, Science & Commerce Colleges on six parameters of education excellence – Dilip Thakore Widely acclaimed for pioneering the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb. 2007), arguably the world’s most comprehensive survey rating India’s Top 1,000 primary-secondary schools in 14 distinctive categories on 14 parameters of excellence and ranking them nationally, in the states and host cities, we introduced our EducationWorld India Higher Education (EWIHE) Rankings in June 2013. The initiative was primarily to draw attention to private professional colleges and universities which tend to get short shrift in the institutional surveys of mainstream media. With government — especially Central government — promoted engineering colleges (IITs, NITs etc), universities and B-schools (IIMs) dominating the league tables of national periodicals such as India Today, Outlook and business magazines, we believed that a useful social purpose would also be served by highlighting the silently rising number of private universities, engineering colleges and B-schools. Many among them have emerged as good quality alternatives to ruinously expensive foreign institutions of higher education for school-leavers unable to qualify for admission into top-ranked government institutions which demand sky-high cut-offs in class XII qualifying exams. Positive public reaction to this initiative has prompted us to publish the EWIHE Rankings annually. Inevitably, the EWIHE Rankings have evolved — and will continue to evolve — with the passage of time. This year in response to feedback received from our multiplying number of readers and accepting the validity of the argument that the overwhelming majority of the estimated 39 million school-leavers enter multi-disciplinary arts, science and commerce colleges annually, we commissioned the well-known field research agency, the Delhi-based Centre for Research & Forecasting Pvt. Ltd (C fore) to conduct an additional survey to rate and rank the country’s Top 100 multi-disciplinary arts, science and commerce colleges in six metro cities. Accordingly, C fore constituted a sample respondents database of 1,770 knowledgeable individuals comprising 946 college faculty and 824 final year students. They were interviewed by C fore field personnel to rate the country’s most well-known multi-disciplinary colleges on six parameters of undergrad education — competence of faculty, faculty welfare and development, curriculum and pedagogy, industry placements, infrastructure and leadership and governance quality — on a 100 point scale with the vital parameter of competence of faculty accorded a weightage of 200. The scores awarded by the respondents under each parameter were totalled and formed the basis for ranking the country’s Top 100 arts, science and commerce colleges inter se. Unsurprisingly, the Top 10 arts, science and commerce colleges list comprises the usual suspects with the Delhi-based St. Stephen’s, Shri Ram College of Commerce and Lady Shri Ram College for Women — which despite their 95 percent plus cut-off requirements experience an annual admission scramble of…
