Uttar Pradesh has the highest number of colleges in the country, followed by Maharashtra and Karnataka, according to the government’s All India Survey for Higher Education (AISHE) 2020-21.

As per the survey, the top 10 states in terms of number of colleges in India include Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and Kerala, each having at least 29 or more colleges per lakh population.

According to the survey report released by the Ministry of Education, there are 8,114 colleges and for every one lakh population there are 32 colleges in Uttar Pradesh.

“Similarly, Maharashtra comes second with 4,532 colleges and 34 colleges per lakh population. Karnataka comes at third position with 4,233 colleges and 62 colleges per lakh population, whereas Rajasthan is at fourth position with 3,694 colleges and 40 colleges per lakh population. Tamil Nadu comes at fifth position with 2,667 colleges and has college density of 40,” the report said.

“Madhya Pradesh comes at sixth position with 2,610 colleges and 29 colleges per lakh population, whereas Andhra Pradesh is at seventh position with 2,601 colleges and 49 colleges per lakh population. At eighth position Gujarat has 2,267 colleges and 31 colleges for every one lakh population,” the survey added.

The survey reported that most of the colleges run only undergraduate level programmes. Only 2.9 per cent of colleges run PhD level programmes and 55.2 per cent run postgraduate level programmes.

“There are 35.8 per cent colleges, which run only single programme, out of which 82.2 per cent are privately managed. Among these, 30.9 per cent colleges run B.Ed courses only. Majority of colleges are smaller in terms of enrolment. 23.6 per cent of the colleges are having enrolment less than 100 and 48.5 per cent of the colleges have a student strength of 100 to 500 which means that 65.1 per cent of the colleges enrol less than 500 students.

“Only four per cent colleges have enrolment of more than 3,000. Out of 41,600 responding colleges, 8,903 (21.4 per cent) are government colleges, 5,658 (13.3 per cent) are private (aided) and 27,039 (65 per cent) are private (unaided),” it said.

The Ministry of Education has been conducting All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) since 2011, covering all higher educational institutions in India.

The detailed report comprises information on different parameters such as student enrolment, teachers’ data, infrastructural information, financial information, etc.

For the first time, in AISHE 2020-21, the higher education institutions, or HEIs, have filled the data online through the Web Data Capture Format (DCF) developed by the Department of Higher Education with the help of the National Informatics Centre (NIC).

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