The State Government will soon start ranking its higher education institutions, State Higher Education Secretary Sunil Paliwal said here on Friday.
Speaking at the Confederation of Indian Industry’s Third Edition of National Higher Education Conclave, he said it would be on the lines of the National Institutional Ranking Framework of the Central Government. The State Government had taken a cue for this from Karnataka, which ranked its universities and also deemed universities.
Five parameters
The Government would rank the 28 universities on five parameters that included quality of education and research capability. This was one of the measures aimed at improving the ranking of the State institutions at the national and global level.
At present, Anna University was one among the top 10 institutions in the country and Bharathiar University was at the 28th rank, well in the top 50 institutions.
Mr. Paliwal said the Government had also set goals for its institutions to improve their rankings at the global level - Anna University to enter the top 500 institutions at the global level and Madras and Bharathiar universities to enter the top 10 at the national level.
To this end, the State Government had recently organised a workshop involving vice-chancellors, registrars, quality assurance cell coordinators and experts and consultants to look at ways to improve rankings.
On the administrative side, the Government had also set in motion a process to ensure that the posts of vice-chancellors were not vacant. For the Alagappa and Annamalai universities, it had already written to the people concerned to constitute the search committee.
The Government was doing all this because it was time to focus on the quality of education as the State had already done well in the quantity, what with its gross enrolment ratio of 44.3 at almost twice that of the country’s 24.5.
P. Ravichandran, Chairman, CII Tamil Nadu, said the organisation was working towards suggesting new skill sets for students that the industry was looking at. C.R. Swaminathan, past chairman, CII Southern Region, spoke on the CII EDU portal that was aimed at improving education and employability prospects.
R. Nandini, Conclave Chairperson, delivered the theme address by focussing on the recommendations of the Education Panel of CII. S. Malarvizhi, Conclave Co-chairperson, delivered the concluding remarks.
