Since EducationWorld was launched as India’s pioneer sui generis education focused news magazine on November 1, 1999 with the mission to “build the pressure of public opinion to make education the #1 item on the national agenda”, it’s a matter of pride and achievement that despite suffering fire, floods, riots, the pangs of disprized love, insolence of office, the proud man’s contumely, force majeure, acts of God and inevitable accidents, we have never failed to hit the newsstands on or near the scheduled date.
The utter mismanagement of the Covid crisis which is devastating the economy and society makes it especially important for us to aid, enable and advise our core constituency — educators, parents and students — on ways and means being employed by the Republic’s most respected schools, colleges and universities to ensure that children and youth continue learning in spite of the ill-advised shut down of all education institutes since mid-March 2020. Although children of the urban middle class have switched to digitally enabled online learning with a fair measure of success, the vast majority from low-income and rural homes have been left in the lurch, to learn best as they can from an alphabet soup of one-way online and televised government programmes. It’s a matter of deep regret that mitigating the learning loss of 80 percent of India’s 500 million children and youth has received so little attention within mass media and the establishment.
Nevertheless, for school-leavers making up for learning loss in the year past at the collegiate level is a matter of vital importance. Therefore they need to carefully choose colleges which are in sync with their aptitudes and aspirations. As usual our league tables ranking India’s most respected ASC (arts, science and commerce) and private engineering colleges are based on field surveys as against the more popular (and less expensive) jury rankings. Our trusted partner, the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb. 2000), arguably India’s most respected market research and opinion polls company (all its recent assembly election forecasts proved correct), interviewed a well-balanced mix of 6,479 educationists, faculty, students and industry representatives to constitute a database of knowledgeable sample respondents.
These league tables provide parents and students invaluable information to enable them to choose colleges most suited to their aptitudes and aspirations. And they also provide college managements valuable SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
