Like most people, until a few years ago, I wasn’t aware that the majority of India’s 29 million youth in the 18-24 age group fortunate to access tertiary education — incidentally a mere 20 percent of the country’s youth in this age cohort is enrolled in higher education cf. 85 percent in South Korea and 50-60 percent in the US and UK – are in privately promoted higher education institutions. The plain truth is that India’s 266 private universities, 2,776 engineering and technology institutes, 2,415 B-schools and other assorted private post-secondary education institutes prepare 65 percent of the country’s educated youth for the organised sector jobs market. Admittedly, the majority of private higher education institutions aren’t doing a good job of it because government, industry, agriculture and total factor productivity in the Indian economy is rock bottom. Yet the blame for poor national productivity can’t be entirely laid at the door of private tertiary institutions. Despite being heavily subsidised and favoured by the Central and state governments, public higher education institutions are at best marginally better. Except for a few universities and professional institutions promoted and/or funded by the Central government — Delhi University, Indian Institute of Science, the IIMs and IITs – the great majority of universities and undergrad colleges established by state governments have been ruined by the country’s bull-in-china-shop politicians and bureaucrats who have been recklessly interfering with, and eroding the autonomy of public universities and colleges for decades. With the mainstream media paying minimal attention to private institutions of higher education, in 2015, your editors took a decision to separate the sheep from goats among the country’s private universities, engineering institutes and B-schools which have quietly and unobtrusively emerged as popular alternatives to public universities and colleges. In our cover story, 8,386 sample respondents drawn from academia and industry have rated the country’s Top 100 private universities, engineering institutes and B-schools on 30 parameters of academic excellence and have ranked them inter se in three different categories. Moreover, to inject a measure of objectivity into the exercise, on the important parameter of research and innovation, citations of faculty of ranked institutions in refereed journals approved by Scopus and Web of Science, have been taken into consideration. The comprehensive EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2017-18 league tables are the outcome of serious, professionally managed field interviews spread over four months. They provide valuable, actionable information to the millions of aspirational youth who don’t or can’t make it into the highly subsidised top-ranked public universities and professional institutes. The country’s top-ranked private higher ed institutions offer globally benchmarked education to youngsters aspiring to quality education and prepared to pay reasonable — by global standards — prices for it. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn WhatsApp
