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Wednesday, 10 August 2022, Bhatye
NIRF released their ranking data for Indian Institutes for the year 2022.
The report summarized the process of ranking as follows:
100 institutions are ranked in Overall and University since inception of these two categories. While number of institutions that are being ranked in Engineering has been increased to 200 from 2019 onwards, number of institutions ranked in Management and Pharmacy are being increased from 75 to100 each from this year onwards. However, number of institutions ranked are restricted between 30 and 75 in subject domains namely Architecture, Law, Medical, Dental as well as in Research Institutions.[1]
The ranking framework evaluates institutions on five broad generic groups of parameters, i.e. Teaching, Learning and Resources (TLR), Research and Professional Practice (RP), Graduation Outcome (GO), Outreach and Inclusivity (OI) and Perception (PR). Ranks are assigned based on total sum of marks secured by HEIs for each of these five broad groups of parameters.
The report for 2022 mentioned the fact that, It can also be observed that public-funded institutions including CFTIs, and a few centrally funded universities hog most of the top-ranks in almost all categories of rankings. Moreover, a significant number of state and privately funded universities and institutions appear in top 100 ranks in various categories of ranking.
You can read the whole report here: India Rankings Report 2022.
What I Think?
Before I put my view/analysis (and probably affect your view), take a look at these Scatter Plots of NIRF Score vs Institution’s Rank.
What do you observe? Anything Peculiar??
NIRF Score vs Rank – Scatter Plots
Now let me put my View..
Look at this plot for Overall category..
See that steep initial drop in Score?? It drops from 87.59 for IIT, Madras to 56.91 IISER, Pune i.e. a drop of 35% from Top Institute’s Score to Third Quartile Value just after 25 institutes. This pattern is observed more or less for all other Categories and Subject Domains.
Also for these 2 institutions, across 5 broad generic groups of parameters, scores varies as follows:
Similar trend is observed for rest of the categories and Subject Domains, where the Score drops initially at high rate with Rank then kind of levels off. The drop from maximum to 3rd Quartile is approximately between (-37.13% to -21.01%) among different Categories & Subject Domains.
So now one must ponder on Why such steep drop in Scores occurs and what does it mean for Quality of Education in India?
It means that the resources like well-qualified Teachers, Infrastructure & Financial Fire-Power are concentrated in Top Quartile of institutes (Top 25%). Hence the Score which is a measure of the Overall Quality of Institutes and ranks them accordingly is lower for rest of the 75% institutions (Rank 26-100). Accordingly we can say that there is faster drop in the quality of educational institutes beyond initial few. Hence there is a inequality in terms of Resources Allocations among the participants. This kind of inequality is highly undesirable since it creates a great divide among institutes and asymmetric distributions of Government Aid. Also it indirectly causes Credential Inflation as many low ranking, low quality institutes inflate grades of their student’s while competing with their top peers.
Also this presence of small group of High Quality institutions creates a Honeypot Problem.
On lines similar to those of Abhijit Banerjee’s on Government Jobs, I would say..
This kind of inequality in terms of quality can rock the entire educational system into a tailspin.
If admissions in few Top Educational Institute become so much attractive due to their quality than the rest and also become very scarce at the same time, then it is worthwhile for every student to wait around and queue for those seats.
And this is what happening with admissions in these institutes. If the everyone is waiting in a queue, then it necessitates students to undergo an Entrance Exam and then students would spend most productive couple of years of their lives for preparing for these exams (or as much as they are allowed to by their parents, anyway). If these top institutions stopped being quite so desirable (not by deteriorating their quality but by improving quality of others and by making sure that resource allocation is equal). The country would gain large trained and educated workforce, wasted in the pursuit of the mostly unattainable. Of course, top/elite institutions are also attractive in other countries as well, since a degree from these institutions guarantees job security, but these developed countries and countries like China have more number of quality institutions per million population than India.
One observation regarding the parameter calculation methodology report is that, it lacks couple of details e.g. the Component Metric, Student Strength including Ph.D. students (SS) of Teaching, Learning & Resources (TLR) parameter mentions in the descriptions that The functions f(NT , NE) and f(NP) are functions to be determined by NIRF and hence the details of these functions are not provided. But till 2017, the Methodology for Ranking of Academic Institutions in India (Ranking Methodology and Metrics – 2017.pdf) did mentioned that The functions f(NT) and f(NP) are functions to be determined by NIRF. The functions will be notified at the time of announcing ranks. Since then the 2nd sentence is dropped from newer reports. The details of these functions [f(NT , NE) and f(NP)] are not available on NIRF Website.
Also there is no way to compare NIRF Score with NAAC Grade (to cross validate the NIRF Rankings) as NAAC Accreditation is once in 5 Year thing vs NIRF Ranking which is a yearly measure. Different institutes undergoes the process of the NAAC accreditation in different academic years so direct comparison between NAAC Grade/Score vs NIRF Score across all participants in single year is not possible.
What else this NIRF Score indicates?
Since the scores data for 5 broad generic groups of parameters is not provided in an easily accessible form (in the form of spreadsheet), it is tedious the enter the data manually for each institute for all subcategories/sub-parameters and then process it. But this data if made available would provide more insight about our educational system than Aggregate Score.
I hope that in future NIRF would also publish the Raw Data alongside the Rank and Score data.
Anyone interested in this topic should read an essay Public Goods, Private Goods by David F. Labaree
And here is the data that I used: PDF
[1] What this mean alternatively is that, since these are Specialized Streams/Subjects, there are few institutes across the country and even fewer who can clear the standards and get a reputable score in the ranking system. Hence the number of ranked institutes in these subjects is kept lower as compared to Colleges or Engineering Institutes, which are plenty.
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