Ab initio, your editors have accorded special importance to private institutions of higher learning. We believe private universities with investment and reputations to lose, are more likely to provide rigorous, globally benchmarked academic, research and life skills education In recent years privately promoted universities, particularly new genre, globally benchmarked liberal arts and sciences undergrad colleges modelled on America’s famous Ivy League institutions, have captured the imagination of the country’s aspirational post-liberalisation middle and upper class. The steadily rising number of unemployed graduates holding devalued degrees of government — especially state government — universities notorious for their crumbling infrastructure and obsolete syllabuses and curriculums, has created acute awareness of the value of real rather than ritual education dispensed by the majority of government institutions of higher education tightly controlled by generalist bureaucrats out of touch with the requirements of Indian industry and business. Therefore ever since EducationWorld (estb. 1999) started publishing its annual EW India Higher Education Rankings in 2013, your editors have accorded special importance to private institutions of higher learning. We believe that academically and financially autonomous standalone privately-promoted higher education institutions with investment and reputations to lose, are more likely to provide rigorous, globally benchmarked academic, research and life skills education. This not to say that your editors are indifferent to government colleges and universities. Some public higher ed institutions promoted at taxpayers’ expense by the Central and state governments also make a substantial contribution to national progress and development. However they are hamstrung by numerous social and community goals that tend to dilute their academic excellence objective. Therefore to avoid apples and oranges type comparisons, we believe that the public interest — and the interest of parents and school-leaving students in particular — would be better served if public and private institutions of education are ranked separately. This is the distinction we make in our annual EducationWorld India School Rankings — the world’s largest and most comprehensive schools annual survey — published every September. Now after several years of chopping and changing, we have resolved to follow a similar path while rating and ranking India’s most respected institutions of higher learning. Last month (April) we published league tables ranking India’s most respected private autonomous, government autonomous, Top 100 non autonomous and Top 100 private engineering colleges. In this issue we present discrete league tables ranking the country’s Top 150 most reputed private universities, Top 150 government universities and Top 100 B-schools. To conduct the EW India Private University Rankings 2020-21 survey, over 150 field personnel of the highly-reputed Delhi-based market research and opinion polls company Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, stb.2000), interviewed 4,168 sample respondents comprising 2,214 faculty and 1,126 final year students of 162 universities, and 828 industry representatives in 25 cities countrywide. They were requested to award private universities they are familiar with, scores of 1-300 on ten parameters of higher education excellence, viz, faculty competence faculty welfare & development, research and innovation, curriculum and pedagogy, industry interface, placements, infrastructure, internationalism, leadership/governance…
