Higher education enrollment increases by 21% in last five years

Higher education saw an increase in enrollment numbers of 21 per cent in the last five years, the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) report for 2020-21 showed. The union ministry of education released the report late Sunday, which showed that the total enrollment in higher education has increased to nearly 4.14 crore in 2020-21 from 3.85 crore in 2019-20.

Since 2014-15, there has been an increase of around 72 Lakh in the enrolment, the report revealed. Among this, the increase in female enrolment in the last five years was 28 per cent. The report also showed that in a year, the enrolment of girl children went up from 1.88 crore (in 2019-20) to 2.01 crore (in 2020-21). The percentage of female enrolment to total enrolment has increased from 45 per cent in 2014-15 to around 49 per cent in 2020-21, the government said in a release. Additionally, the Gender Parity Index (GPI) which is the ratio of female gross enrollment ratio (GER) to male GER, has increased from 1 in 2017-18 to 1.05 in 2020-21.

The AISHE report is based on the ministry of education’s survey that covers all higher educational institutions in India collecting detailed information on different parameters such as student enrollment, teacher’s data, infrastructural information, financial information etc. “For the first time, in AISHE 2020-21, HEIs have filled data using an entirely online data collection platform through the Web Data Capture Format (DCF) developed by the Department of Higher Education through the National Informatics Centre (NIC),” the ministry said.

The top performing six states in terms of number of students enrolled are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka and Rajasthan.

In all, 79.06 per cent of the total students are enrolled in undergraduate level courses while 11.5 per cent are enrolled in postgraduate level courses. “Among disciplines at undergraduate level, enrollment is highest in Arts (33.5 per cent), followed by Science (15.5 per cent), Commerce (13.9 per cent) and Engineering & Technology (11.9 per cent).Among streams at postgraduate level, maximum students are enrolled in Social Science (20.56 per cent) followed by science (14.83 per cent),” the ministry said.

Amongst Scheduled Caste (SC) students, the GER went up 1.9 points from 2019-20 numbers, increasing from 56.57 lakh in 2019-20 to 58.95 lakh in 2020-21. The enrolment of Scheduled Tribe (ST) students increased from 21.6 lakh in 2019-20 to 24.1 lakh in 2020-21. The ministry said that the enrolment of students from the Other Backward Classes (OBC) community has also increased from 1.42 crore in 2019-20 to 1.48 crore in 2020-21.