Centre to rank all higher education institutions

The Centre is set to rank all higher educational institutions from next year without requiring them to come forward and submit data for a comparative assessment of their performance under various parameters.

The Ministry of Human Resources Development (HRD) has decided to engage its statistics department to collect the required data and information to rank the universities and colleges in 2018.

This comes after only a fraction of the existing institutions came forward to join the nationwide ranking exercise, conducted under the aegis of the ministry for the year 2016-2017.

India has the world’s biggest network of higher educational institutions with at least 760 universities, 38,498 colleges and 12,276 standalone institutions. However, just about 3,000 colleges and universities participated in the 2017 ranking, results of which were announced on Monday.

Majority of the institutions preferred not to be ranked for the second consecutive year as their participation in the nationwide exercise was not mandatory.  “Many of the higher educational institutions did not take part this year because they were required to submit data on a variety of heads with introduction of several new parameters for assessment of their performance. We do not know whether they did not want to share data sought with us or not,” an official said.