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Take Your Pick From The Best

BW Online Bureau Jul 02, 2018

The modern world academic rankings of educational institutions began in 2003 with a mandate from the Chinese government to the Shanghai Jiao Tong University to benchmark Chinese universities against their Western counterparts. Born as the Shanghai Jiao Tong Rankings, the lists are today popularly known as the Academic Rankings of World Universities. The year 2004 saw the birth of the combined Times Higher Education (THE)- Quacquarelli Symonds (QS) World University Rankings. In 2009, THE split to form its own independent rankings (first published in 2010). Today, there are over two dozen ranking agencies across the world creating a range of lists with the purpose of helping students, parents and governments form informed opinions.

After its split from QS, THE re-modelled its ranking framework from the usual five broad parameters to 13 ‘performance’ indicators. Both QS and THE’s rankings rely primarily on outcome-based metrics derived from third-party databases, with little data coming from the educational institutions themselves. Much emphasis is placed on subjective perception-based metrics estimated using independently conducted surveys. The participation of India in general and academicians/researchers with working knowledge of Indian academia in these surveys has historically been very low, thereby pulling down India’s average performance. Subsequent to a recommendation by a ICARE delegation in June 2014, Prime Minister Narendra Modi architected the creation of the National Institutional Ranking Framework in 2015 with the first list being published by the Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India in April 2016.

The BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018 is a pioneering attempt in putting together a highly credible and transparent ranking framework wholly based on data with a clear focus on outcome of the institutions.

The Indian Context
India’s university system as it exists today started in 1857 with three essentially British creations — the Universities of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. As per a 2016-17 government’ report, India today has 864 universities, 40,026 colleges, and 11,669 standalone institutions. Together these institutes enrol about 35.7 million students, achieving a gross enrolment ratio (GER) of 25.2 per cent in the 18-23 age bracket. Apart from the usual classifications as public and private, universities in India are broadly classified as institutions of national importance, central, state, state private and deemed-to-be universities. Colleges, on the other hand, are differentiated as public, private, government-aided, affiliated, and so on. If these classifications were not entangled enough, the system is further plagued by overtly complex regulations governing the formation, financing and functioning of regulatory authorities such as the UGC, AICTE, NBA and NAAC among others.

With specific reference to Asia rankings, one can clearly see the dominant role played by East and South-East Asia, with the big dragon China, grabbing five of the top 10 and 30 of the top 100 positions. China’s exemplary performance may be credited to the vision of the then President Jiang Zemin who created Project 211 and 985 in the early ‘90s. In 2015, China announced the ‘Double World Class’ project, with India making a similar positive move titled ‘Institutions of Eminence’ in 2017.

Why Engineering Rankings
With an estimated work force of 250 million in 2030 expected to take India to the position of the third largest economy in the world, changes in the current educational system need serious thought. Else this promise of demographic dividend may remain a mirage. With 800 million persons below 35 years of age, the Indian work force is considered a demographic dividend. However, recent reports about unemployability of Indian youth, particularly in engineering and management studies, have put a question mark on the real value of this dividend.

At 287 million, India currently has the world’s largest illiterate adult population, says UNESCO. Over 45 per cent of India’s workers are employed in low-productivity agriculture. Worryingly, 31 per cent of India’s youth (15-29 years) is not in employment, education or training, as per an OECD Survey. Dated and poor quality education has created a serious employability issue. Compounding this is India’s growing demographic bulge. By 2027, India will have the world’s largest workforce (between 15 and 64 years) crossing a billion and outpacing China.

Engineering institutions in India fall short on the required indicators such as research productivity, innovation and patents, international student enrolment, research citations, etc., which form bulk of the score across most global ranking frameworks.

The global higher education scene is alive with innovation and change. Globally, engineering institutions are reforming, adapting and revolutionising. Indian engineering institutions can no longer do what they have always been doing, and expect to maintain or improve their position in the national or global rankings.

BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018
Understanding the special circumstances in India and particularly the varying challenges in different states of the country, BW Businessworld and Indian Centre for Academic Rankings and Excellence (ICARE), in consultation with academicians, scholars, researchers and employers, conceived and designed a comprehensive assessment framework with the purpose of providing high quality, ethical, independent comparison of the quality of engineering and technology schools across the country.

BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018 is to be viewed as a tool amongst many other decision making parameters that provide a comprehensive, in-depth and detailed look at institutions, enabling one to identify which universities are the best in the specific areas of research strength, innovation, teaching excellence, graduate employability, inclusiveness and third mission.

All engineering institutions are different from one another and therefore need to be assessed on a range of categories that recognise distinct strengths. It is imperative to understand that each student’s needs are unique and not all institutions — even the highest ranked universities — suit every student.

Using our tool, students and parents can find out which engineering institutions have performed well against a comprehensive list of indicators, allowing them to match their interests to the institutions that are strong in the topics that matter to them. Employers too will find the tool useful in shortlisting institutions based on their strengths thus ensuring a better fit to their human resource needs.

Methodology
Rankings create a competitive spirit and compare institutions to one another comprehensively and put them in a percentile order. The BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018 has been produced with an aim to rank institutions based on their performance in individual areas such as research, innovation, teaching and employability, etc., so as to display independent strengths. The list of rankings displays the best engineering institutions, from top to bottom, based on their total points as well as their score and position in specific parameters.

For our rankings, institutions are evaluated in multiple and different indicators across many categories. Institutions are awarded with an overall rank depending on the number of points scored through the evaluation process whilst displaying their key strengths in specific broad parameters. The methodology was designed with valuable feedback from the industry.

Rather than blindly comparing institutions against one another, BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018 is a fair assessment based on how institutions perform against each other in a variety of metrics thus reflecting the strengths and weaknesses of every institution in each specific area. Most importantly, to re-emphasise, all assessments are based on objective data, with most of it extracted from reliable third-party data sources with little dependence on voluntary submissions. Wherever institutions have submitted data, a dedicated data validation and verification team has verified and ensured its authenticity and validity thus assuring parents and stakeholders the highest standards of quality and reliability. Statistical techniques,Z-score Normalisation, avoiding papers with more than 10 contributors, provision of very low weightage for papers/authors/institutions who have an unusually high number of self-citations, etc., are some of the steps taken to ensure a fair and just representation.

Framework
An engineering institution that appears low on the overall rankings may have a high score on individual parameters, and vice versa. This unique system of rankings can help students identify institutions that may be a good fit, but which did not appear in the top of the rankings thus providing an opportunity for lesser known institutions and or specialist strength engineering institutions to shine.

BW-ICARE Engineering Rankings 2018

Top 50 Government-run Engineering Colleges I