IF WE TAKE a bird’s eye view of our higher education system, we quickly discover that it is a very complicated one. We have over 33,000 institutions, which train close to 20 million people. The system can be broadly divided into professional and non-professional colleges, publicly funded, partially funded, and fully private. In the non-professional, that is the Arts, Sciences, Social Studies, Commerce, and so on, we find a pyramidal structure. At the top are the 42 Central universities, and below them a hodgepodge of 275 state, 90 private, and 130 universities.
When it comes to professional courses, we have seven All India Institutes of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), 23 Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), 20 Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs), an equal number of Indian Institutes of Information Technology (IIITs),…
