Assessing the quality of higher education institutions in India: an alternative framework

Abstract

Various stakeholders use the ranking of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) as a measure of quality. This is evident from numerous ranking efforts – both of the government (National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) of the Ministry of Human Resources Development (MHRD), the National Academic Accreditation Council (NAAC) and the National Board of Accreditation (NBA)) and the private sector. Developing countries like India should assess the academic quality by working with parameters that are globally acceptable, transparent to all stakeholders and not amenable to the control of lobby groups. One such parameter is publications in reputed international journals indexed by databases like Scopus and Web of Science is also considered by the NIRF. However, in contrary to the NIRF method, we propose that instead of considering the total publications the computations should be based on the publication rate (number of publications per teacher) to control the faculty size bias. Besides using the NIRF 2017 data, we observed that higher density of PhD students increases both the number and the quality of publications and HEIs that invest more, tends to have a higher publication rate. Therefore, we conclude that the Indian HEIs should increase the number of Ph D students and access better funding in order to improve their global presence.