The seventh edition of the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) has been announced by the Education Minister of India Yesterday. As per the survey, only 31.88 percent of the faculty in engineering institutes outside the top 100 have doctoral qualifications, while only 32.9 percent of these institutes meet the AICTE-prescribed criteria of 20 students per teacher.
The NIRF report observes that the lack of PhD-qualified teachers in higher educational institutions is a “serious handicap” since mentorship received during doctoral training plays a “vital role in preparing the faculty for a teaching career” at the college and university level.
While institutes with good ranks are expected to perform better across indicators than those outside the top 100, the NIRF ranking report provides a rare glimpse into the extent of the gap. The report shows among the top 100 institutions, across categories, the share of faculty with Ph.D. varies from a minimum of 59.73 percent in the case of general colleges to a maximum of 89.04 percent in the case of management institutions.
But in the case of institutes outside the top 100, the numbers dip sharply: from a minimum of 31.88 percent for engineering institutions to a maximum of 59.62 percent for universities. The average number of faculty per institution (top 100) ranges from 645 in universities to 330 in engineering colleges. The corresponding numbers are 232 and 111 in the case of institutes falling outside the top 100 categories.
The NIRF 2022 report spots a similar trend in the case of research as well. “The data seems to follow the famous Pareto’s principle, in the sense that most of the research is being conducted within the top 100 institutions in every category,” it states. The principle, based on the works of Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, refers to the fact that in most areas, 80 percent of the results are an outcome of efforts put in by 20 percent of the players.
As much as 71.06 percent of the high-quality papers (HCPs) come from the top 100 engineering institutions, with the remaining 1,081 participating and eligible engineering institutions contributing only 28.94 percent, the report says. The report further added that A closer look at the top 100 engineering institutions shows that Indian Institutes of Technology account for the lion’s share of research publications at 35.84 percent, followed by deemed universities at 22.92 percent and National Institutes of Technology (18.69 percent).
The pandemic, meanwhile, has caused a dip in the growth rate of PhDs in the engineering institutes, according to the report. The 1,181 engineering institutes which participated in the rankings process produced 6,502 full-time PhDs in 2020-21, as against 6,099 in 2019-21, showing a growth rate of 6.61 percent. Between 2018-19 and 2020-21, the rate of increase was 10.63 percent.
The average salary of engineering graduates also did not rise as much as it did in the previous years. Between 2019-19 and 2019-20, the median salary of placed students rose from Rs 3.40 lakh to Rs 3.75 lakh, showing a rise of 10.33 percent. But in 2020-21, the median salary was Rs 3.98 lakh, a rise of 6.62 percent.
Courtesy of The New Indian Express
