Karnataka tops in access to higher education

Karnataka has the maximum number of colleges — 59 per lakh of the population eligible for higher education and ranks third in the country with 4,047 colleges across the state.

According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019-20, Bengaluru Urban with 1,009 colleges takes the top rank in the list of districts with the maximum number of colleges followed by Jaipur, which is a distant second with 606 colleges.

The survey, released on Thursday by Education Minister Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, also revealed that of the 1,043 universities, 42,343 colleges and 11,779 standalone institutions listed on the AISHE portal, 32.6% colleges, run only a single programme, out of which 84.1% are privately managed.

The majority of the colleges are smaller in terms of enrollment of students as 16.6% of colleges have less than 100 students and 48.9% of colleges have student strength of 100 to 500.

“Only 4% of colleges have an enrollment more than 3,000,” the survey said.

The survey noted that only 2.7% of the colleges offer PhD programmes and 35.04% of colleges run postgraduate (PG) level courses.

At the PhD level, the maximum numbers of students are enrolled in engineering and technology stream followed by science. The engineering and technology stream is divided into 19 sub-streams with a total number of 52,478 students enrolled for PhD and 1.77 lakh students at PG level.

Computer engineering has the highest number of 7,682 students enrolled for PhD with 57.7% male students. Mechanical engineering is the second-highest, having 6,714 students with 91.2% male students.

According to the survey, there has been a growth of 11.4% in student enrollment.

“Total enrollment in higher education has been estimated to be 38.5 million with 19.6 million boys and 18.9 million females. Women constitute 49% of the total enrollment,” it said.

The Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER) in Higher education in India is 27.1, which is calculated for 18-23 years of age group. GER for male population is 26.9 and for females, it is 27.3. For Scheduled Castes, it is 23.4 and for Scheduled Tribes, it is 18.0 as compared to the national GER of 27.1.

Gender Parity Index (GPI) in higher education in 2019-20 is 1.01 against 1.00 in 2018-19 indicating an improvement in the relative access to higher education for females of eligible age group compared to males, the survey said.

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