Why Indian Colleges Rank Low in the World?

Do you believe that Indians have no grey matter? Or that our universities and colleges are not good enough?

Why are Indians dominating the software industry globally? Why our doctors are so fine that where ever they practice, they excel.

Our students do better than any country students on an average including the foreign language that does not deter us to master it even when never spoken in most Indian homes!

The failure lies not in our students or universities  but in the ranking system.

The global college ranking is based on these things primarily.

So let’s look into the parameters on which the rankings are done.

• Teaching (the learning environment)
• Research (volume, income and reputation)
• Citations (research influence);
• International outlook (staff, students and research)
• Industry income (knowledge transfer)

The first parameter teaching is one fifth of the entire point system. This is where our universities do good. We are primarily teaching universities.

Second parameter is the Research or Citations done in colleges. As good as Nil is the research in our Indian universities as the funding from the Government is diverted to only DRDO and CSIR to the tune of  Rs 15 thousand crore per year. Even if a 10% is diverted to other state universities, it would shoot up the ranking of Indian universities.

Third is the Outreach or the number of international programs, international students and international faculties. We don’t have the funding or the policy to maximise these. There are very few outreach programs in IITs and IIMs in comparison to the hundreds per university in US or Europe. The get huge funding per professor per department to lavishly indulge in outreach programs and hire international faculties. We have huge population that won’t justify diversion of any resource out.

And lastly the industry income aka knowledge transfer is not encouraged. Alumni knowledge is rarely sought after. The universities are state owned so most function lazily and don’t know how to market themselves or reach out to private companies. The exchange of brains between the colleges and private firms is nil. Companies like Tata, Infosys, Reliance need to join hands with these universities and start several research labs and incubators.

So my humble opinion is that we don’t lack in knowledge or intelligence but research funding.