In this issue we have rated and ranked 36 private engineering and technology universities which provide superior quality education and have been awarded deemed university status In all assessments about the growth and development potential of Indian industry and emergence of India as a superpower of the 21st century, the country’s Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs) are given pride of place. But the reality is that the country’s 23 IITs and 31 NITs admit only 32,000 school-leavers per year, i.e, 2 percent of the 1.6 million who write their JEE (Joint Entrance Exam) followed by the IIT Advance exams — widely regarded the world’s toughest higher education entrance exams. The remaining 1.28 million school-leavers who opt for engineering and technology education are absorbed by the country’s 3,415 other government and private engineering colleges — some of the latter grudgingly designated ‘deemed’ universities for the superior education they provide. And of these other engineering and technology higher education institutions (HEIs), the privately promoted constitute a clear majority. That’s why when the sui generis EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER) were conceptualised and introduced in 2013, we have awarded pride of place to private engineering colleges and universities which are separately rated and ranked. Indeed, IITs and NITs are deliberately excluded from our league tables. Firstly, because they admit a very small and top-ranked minority of school leavers, and secondly because they routinely top the league tables of all media publications as also rankings published by government. Therefore right from the start we have omitted the IITs and NITs from the annual EWIHER. Our prime objective is to aid and enable the remainder 98 percent who don’t make it into the prized IITs and NITs to make an informed choice of an engineering HEI. In our previous issue (April) we ranked the country’s most respected engineering colleges which admit school-leavers into undergraduate study programmes. In this issue, we have rated and ranked 36 private engineering universities. These institutions provide superior quality engineering and technology education and have been awarded ‘deemed-to-be-university’ aka deemed university status, empowered to award their own degrees and diplomas. On the other hand, undergrad colleges are obliged to award degrees of the universities to which they are affiliated, although autonomous public and private colleges are also permitted to inscribe their names on university degrees. However unlike public (government) universities, deemed universities are not permitted to affiliate any colleges. Nor are they permitted to describe themselves as universities simpliciter. They are obligated to use the word ‘deemed’ and until recently the elongated ‘deemed-to-be-university’ in their titles.
