From the Editor-in-Chief
India Today's 30th annual Best Colleges Survey not only assesses colleges by the quality of education, but also how they are responding to the AI era
India Today’s annual Best Colleges Survey is marking its 30th edition with this special issue. It performs a more critical function than usual, coming in a season when anxieties are running high among students and parents, and the air is rife with debate. College admissions are very much in the headlines, and not necessarily for the best reasons. Two of the main national entrance exams for undergraduate courses saw disruptions this summer. The CUET-UG (Common University Entrance Exam-Undergraduate), which governs admissions to 250-plus universities, was hit by a technological glitch and needed a partial retest. The results just went live—on June 23. Everyone would be scouring the field right now to see which options are open before them. As for the June 21 retest in the more controversy-marred NEET-UG (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate) exam for medical streams, the results will come in July. Over the next few days and weeks, millions of students will be facing choices that will change their lives. Our survey will prove invaluable in allaying anxieties and lifting the fog of confusion. Conducted with reputed market research agency MDRA since 2018, the India Today Best Colleges rankings are long recognised as the best in the class. The fear of the unknown lives and breeds in an information gap. We fill that gap with credible, organised and user-friendly information.
The following pages will bring much-needed reassurance to college aspirants. They will notice that quality college education is being rapidly democratised and decentralised in today’s India. Our evaluation method, using 112 indicators for each of the 14 streams we rank, focuses on giving you the best. But we also define ‘the best’ along multiple axes, in context-specific ways, in terms of the real value it offers the student in the real world. So, what you get is increasingly not just a small set of elite institutions that are despairingly out of reach for the majority. The top names in many disciplines may not have changed, nor the fact that many of these continue to be concentrated in certain metropolises. Delhi NCR, for instance, accounts for 44 of the top 10 ranks, 96 of the top 25 and a staggering 143 of the top 50, more than the next two cities combined. But you no longer need to conceive of Indian colleges as forming a single pyramid, with only a narrow space at the top. And not just because the South is a new powerhouse, with Bengaluru emerging as a new education capital and claiming, along with Chennai, 34 of the Top 10 rankings.
The real news lies further afield. The survey’s ‘emerging destinations’ list shows merit is no longer a big-city monopoly. Small towns are quietly producing Top 30 colleges. Our survey shows there is a best city for almost every course, and new entrants in the rankings prove quality education is not a closed club. Moreover, there are zonal rankings for East, West, North and South, besides city-wise top-threes, so whether an aspiring student is in Patna or Patiala, in Shillong, Shirdi or Sriperumbudur, he or she can find the best option within reach. Geographical spread is only one expression of the expanding gamut of possibilities. Education these days is also a product with a horizontal price spread, and the difference between government and private fees can be enormous, especially in medicine, engineering, law, design and architecture. Parents need to make careful decisions, taking into account their spending capacity and also whether the placements records of colleges justify the expenditure in fees. Our innovation, the return on investment (RoI) index, fills this gap in enlightening ways. A top private engineering college may deliver an entry-level salary package upwards of Rs 35 lakh per annum but still be beaten on pure RoI by modestly priced government colleges. A ‘cheap’ but quality college is delivering a real value of a different sort that we recognise and rank.
There’s also a purely quantitative spread. Overall participation has quadrupled to 2,016 since 2018. These are the best from a much deeper field of competition. What students are presented with here is therefore more like a supermarket shelf of choices, vast and accessible, but with assured quality along a relevant strand of analysis. A new batch of freshers will be entering college at a time when, on the other side of their education, the job market is getting increasingly difficult and graduate unemployment remains worryingly high. With the economy itself in transition, skills these days are being reshaped by technology. Being nimble and adaptive will serve them better than sticking to old ways of evaluating the field. This edition’s most significant new category, Most Improved Colleges, answers this need. It measures the percentage improvement in a college’s rank over the past five years. Shifting the viewfinder from a static summit to where the momentum is, we find that often this has to do with how quickly a college is responding to the AI era. Our analysis of such deep and nuanced trends is what makes this edition an invaluable field guide for the student explorer.
Happy hunting and all the very best.
India Today’s annual Best Colleges Survey is marking its 30th edition with this special issue. It performs a more critical function than usual, coming in a season when anxieties are running high among students and parents, and the air is rife with debate. College admissions are very much in the headlines, and not necessarily for the best reasons. Two of the main national entrance exams for undergraduate courses saw disruptions this summer. The CUET-UG (Common University Entrance Exam-Undergraduate), which governs admissions to 250-plus universities, was hit by a technological glitch and needed a partial retest. The results just went live—on June 23. Everyone would be scouring the field right now to see which options are open before them. As for the June 21 retest in the more controversy-marred NEET-UG (National Eligibility cum Entrance Test-Undergraduate) exam for medical streams, the results will come in July. Over the next few days and weeks, millions of students will be facing choices that will change their lives. Our survey will prove invaluable in allaying anxieties and lifting the fog of confusion. Conducted with reputed market research agency MDRA since 2018, the India Today Best Colleges rankings are long recognised as the best in the class. The fear of the unknown lives and breeds in an information gap. We fill that gap with credible, organised and user-friendly information.
The following pages will bring much-needed reassurance to college aspirants. They will notice that quality college education is being rapidly democratised and decentralised in today’s India. Our evaluation method, using 112 indicators for each of the 14 streams we rank, focuses on giving you the best. But we also define ‘the best’ along multiple axes, in context-specific ways, in terms of the real value it offers the student in the real world. So, what you get is increasingly not just a small set of elite institutions that are despairingly out of reach for the majority. The top names in many disciplines may not have changed, nor the fact that many of these continue to be concentrated in certain metropolises. Delhi NCR, for instance, accounts for 44 of the top 10 ranks, 96 of the top 25 and a staggering 143 of the top 50, more than the next two cities combined. But you no longer need to conceive of Indian colleges as forming a single pyramid, with only a narrow space at the top. And not just because the South is a new powerhouse, with Bengaluru emerging as a new education capital and claiming, along with Chennai, 34 of the Top 10 rankings.
The real news lies further afield. The survey’s ‘emerging destinations’ list shows merit is no longer a big-city monopoly. Small towns are quietly producing Top 30 colleges. Our survey shows there is a best city for almost every course, and new entrants in the rankings prove quality education is not a closed club. Moreover, there are zonal rankings for East, West, North and South, besides city-wise top-threes, so whether an aspiring student is in Patna or Patiala, in Shillong, Shirdi or Sriperumbudur, he or she can find the best option within reach. Geographical spread is only one expression of the expanding gamut of possibilities. Education these days is also a product with a horizontal price spread, and the difference between government and private fees can be enormous, especially in medicine, engineering, law, design and architecture. Parents need to make careful decisions, taking into account their spending capacity and also whether the placements records of colleges justify the expenditure in fees. Our innovation, the return on investment (RoI) index, fills this gap in enlightening ways. A top private engineering college may deliver an entry-level salary package upwards of Rs 35 lakh per annum but still be beaten on pure RoI by modestly priced government colleges. A ‘cheap’ but quality college is delivering a real value of a different sort that we recognise and rank.
There’s also a purely quantitative spread. Overall participation has quadrupled to 2,016 since 2018. These are the best from a much deeper field of competition. What students are presented with here is therefore more like a supermarket shelf of choices, vast and accessible, but with assured quality along a relevant strand of analysis. A new batch of freshers will be entering college at a time when, on the other side of their education, the job market is getting increasingly difficult and graduate unemployment remains worryingly high. With the economy itself in transition, skills these days are being reshaped by technology. Being nimble and adaptive will serve them better than sticking to old ways of evaluating the field. This edition’s most significant new category, Most Improved Colleges, answers this need. It measures the percentage improvement in a college’s rank over the past five years. Shifting the viewfinder from a static summit to where the momentum is, we find that often this has to do with how quickly a college is responding to the AI era. Our analysis of such deep and nuanced trends is what makes this edition an invaluable field guide for the student explorer.
Happy hunting and all the very best.
