Universities to compete with IITs, IIMs in rankings

NIRF rankings are drawn up on the basis of five parameters

Central and State universities will have to compete with institutions like Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institutes of Management in this year’s official rankings of higher education institutions, which will be released early in April.

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) was put in place by the Ministry of Human Resource Development last year, but the first NIRF ranked engineering colleges, business schools and universities in three separate categories.

“This year, we will have a common list of all institutions across disciplines and fields. The IITs, IIMs and our universities will be ranked in a common list,” said an official who did not wish to be named.

“However, we will additionally bring out the ranks in the larger sub-categories, like last year,” the official added.

The NIRF rankings are done on the basis of five parameters against which institutions are rated: teaching and learning resources; research and professional practice; graduation outcome; outreach and inclusivity, and perception.

Pay packages

Asked whether a common ranking of institutions would not be like comparing what were intrinsically different kinds of institutions — as, for instance, placements from the IIMs were likely to be better than universities offering humanities’ courses — the official said the comparisons would be done in such a way as to account for the differences.

“We are not just looking at pay packages but also at different kinds of job placements with different salary levels. We are also accounting for students continuing in higher education,” the official told The Hindu .

“But if students passing out from an institution end up doing nothing, there is some problem and that will reflect in the scores.”

As far as perception of an institution goes, 2.4-2.5 lakh people across India have been asked to rank institutions.

Last year, IIT Madras had topped the list of engineering colleges and IIM Bengaluru had edged out IIM Ahmedabad to top among business schools. Among universities, Jawaharlal Nehru University and Hyderabad University were ranked three and four, respectively, while University of Delhi was at sixth rank.