More colleges, less learning

The annual Ficci-Ernst & Young report has shown interesting data about the situation of the Indian higher education sector especially the number of institutions that have come up in the country and in fact, are growing faster than the enrollment numbers! India has the largest higher education system in the world, with 31,000 institutes compared with 6,742 in the US and 4,297 in China.

So, while the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of the number of institutions in India is 11%, that of student enrollments is only 6%.

So lucrative is the higher education market that more than 5,000 colleges were added in the last one year alone. In the last decade, the number of universities in the country has grown at a CAGR of 7.5% as against the 4.7% growth observed from 1951-2001. The number of colleges have grown at a CAGR of 11% in the period 2001-2011 as against 6.1%...