Author: Sanjay Goel
Published on page 9 of the Education Times, Times of India, on 12th June 2023
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On 5th June 2023, MHRD released the eighth NIRF (National Institutional Ranking Framework) ranking of the top 100 Indian HEIs in thirteen different categories. In 2016, NIRF started with only four categories of institutes – university, engineering, management, and pharmacy. Since then, the number of NIRF ranking categories has been gradually increasing and this year there are thirteen categories. The ranking system helps institutes in terms of branding and self-reflection for improvement. The NIRF rankings aim to gauge the institutes across various categories, based on various important quality parameters like student strength, PG and Ph.D. enrolments, faculty-student ratio, faculty qualification and experience, financial resources, research and IPR outcome, graduate outcomes, placement quality, Ph.D. completion, outreach, inclusivity, and peer perception. The institutes are ranked based on their overall absolute scores within their respective institute categories. To calculate this score, different institute categories assign different importance to these parameters.
Improvement in metric
Most institutes aspire to have a good NIRF rank, and many institutes use their ranks for branding to attract students. However, the relative ranks of institutes only tell a half-truth because the general absolute scores are not very good. The absolute NIRF scores out of 100 tell the real story of Indian higher education. More than 75% of institutes appearing in any of the thirteen different lists of the top hundred institutes have absolute scores of less than 60 marks out of 100. Still, there is a visible improvement in this metric because in 2017 nearly 90% of the top hundred institutes scored lesser than 60 marks. Hence, we can see that the NIRF and other policy interventions are partially successful in uplifting the quality of some middle-ranked institutes. Many such institutes have started emphasising more on working and documenting their work on parameters considered important by NIRF.
In 2016, in the first NIRF ranking, thirty-five institutes scored an absolute score of 75 or above. Despite an increase in the number of institute categories to seven in 2017, this metric dropped to nine. This drop was mainly because of the fine-tuning of the assessment method and this metric increased to fifteen in 2018. Under all the thirteen ranking lists of the top hundred institutes released this year under different categories, only twenty-four institutes out of a few thousand that participated in NIRF 2023, have scored 75 or above marks out of 100 in one or more categories. The reason for this increase in the number of institutes scoring 75 or above marks, from nine to twenty-four from 2017 to 2023, is the addition of new institute categories of Medical, Dental, Agriculture, Law, and Architecture as well as performance improvement by a few institutes. These twenty-four institutes include IISc, six IITs (Madras, Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, Roorkee, and Kharagpur), four IIMs (Ahmedabad, Bangalore, Calcutta, and Kozhikode), AIIMS Delhi, PGIMER, CMS Vellore, SIMATS Chennai, IARI Delhi, BITS Pilani, ICT Mumbai, NIT Calicut, NIPER Hyderabad, JSS College of Pharmacy Ooty, NLSIU Bangaluru, and Manipal College of Dental Sciences. While the IISc and 5 IITs have scored 75 or above marks in two or three categories, all others have done so only in one category.
Examining the list of institutes that achieved high absolute scores of 75 or above, it becomes evident that all of them are highly reputed, well-established, and have been in existence for several decades. No young institute established in the last thirty-five years has been able to score 75 or above marks. Fifteen of these are Institutes of National Importance and eight are declared as the Institutes of Eminence or are part of one. Only six of these do not belong to either of these two categories. Surprisingly, most Institutes of National importance, e.g., several IITs, IIMs, AIIMSs, NITs, IIITs, NIDs, IISERs, NIFTEMs, NIPERs, Central Universities, more than 50% of Institutes of Eminence (IoE), and most NAAC A++ institutes have not scored 75 or above marks in NIRF. Some of them are not even included in any list of the top 100 institutes. All such institutes need to work much harder on NIRF parameters to really be worthy of their tags. Nevertheless, so much incongruency between these systems calls for a careful review.
Considering that there are more than fifty-five thousand institutes of higher education in India, only twenty-four institutes, i.e., less than 0.05%, scoring 75 or more marks in NIRF rankings is indeed very disturbing, particularly because now we are the fifth largest economy of the world. Delhi, Karnataka, and Tamil Nādu together have 50% of these twenty-four institutes. Nine other states/UTs have one or two such institutes. In all other states and UTs, not even a single institute has been able to score 75 or above marks. Overall, this reflects a serious lack of a sufficient number of worthy role models in the higher education ecosystem. Hence, the real quality benchmarks used by many HEIs are far from being the facilitators of excellence.
Dealing with Challenges
Even institutes scoring lesser than 50 marks can find a place in the top 100. Hence, instead of NIRF ranks, the NIRF scores serve as a reminder of the challenges that lie ahead for Indian higher education. There is a pressing need for institutes to enhance their faculty strength and quality, educational infrastructure, research capabilities, and overall quality. However, grossly insufficient government as well as sustained philanthropic funding in higher education is the main reason behind such poor NIRF scores. The massive expansion of higher education mainly driven by the private sector is mainly focused on the improvement of enrolments in a few popular undergraduate programs. Some of these universities are now admitting thousands of undergraduate students every year without having proper faculty and educational infrastructure. A closer look at the NIRF data of individual institutes shows a very poor state of per-student annual expenditure on libraries and laboratories. The poor faculty-student ratio at most HEIs is not at all supportive of promoting research and innovation. There is a severe shortage of postgraduate and doctoral students in many universities. Various committees and education policies have been recommending a near doubling of education spending to 6 percent of the GDP. According to the World Bank data, several countries spend more than 6 percent of their GDP on education. It is crucial for policymakers, administrators, and educators to collectively work towards improving the absolute scores of institutions, fostering a culture of excellence and innovation in Indian higher education.
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Posted on June 12, 2023
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