Across the five southern states, more than 80% of colleges are privately managed, according to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2019-20, released by the Union Ministry of Education on June 10. Over the past five years, the share of the private sector in higher education has risen slightly in Karnataka, and remained stagnant in Andhra Pradesh, Kerala and Tamil Nadu. However, the reverse trend was seen in Telangana. Telangana is the only state that saw several private colleges shutting down, and consequently observed a fall in the total number of students enrolled in private colleges. The percentage of enrolments in private colleges went up marginally in Andhra and Karnataka, while it saw a dip in Tamil Nadu, Telangana and Kerala.
In Telangana, the total number of colleges registered went down from 2454 in 2015-16, to 2071 in 2019-20. The number of private colleges alone went down by at least 64. As a consequence, enrolments in private colleges went down from 9,39,907 in 2015-16 to 8,55,415 in 2019-20, a drop of 95,104 enrolments. In contrast, the enrolments among the government colleges that responded to AISHE went up only by 41,668. Telangana is also the only southern state which saw a dip in overall enrolments, and a fall in the Gross Enrolment Ratio (GER).
The GER indicates the ratio of the number of students enrolled in a certain level of education (regardless of their age) to the population of the age group that officially corresponds to that level of education (18-23 years). According to AISHE, the nationwide GER in higher education has increased in the last five years, from 24.5% in 2015-16 to 27.1% in 2019-20. While the other four southern states saw a considerable rise in their GER, Telangana saw a drop in overall GER from 36.3% in 2015-16 to 35.6% in 2019-20. While the GER among male students fell drastically (from 39.3% to 34.8%), the GER for female students increased from 33.4% to 36.4%. A similar gender-wise trend was seen among SC and ST students as well. One of the stated goals of the National Education Policy 2020 is to increase nationwide GER in higher education to 50% by 2035.
At the national level, enrolment in professional courses is a lot higher in private institutions, compared to government colleges, at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, while the reverse trend is seen for academic courses. Overall, across India, the highest number of new institutions established over the last five years were State Private Universities, whose number went up from 197 in 2015-16 to 327 in 2019-20, indicating that 130 new State Private Universities were set up in this period. The number of Institutes of National Importance has also increased drastically from 75 in 2015-16 to 135 in 2019-20.
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