The dawn of the new era of Artificial Intelligence heralds a technology evolution inflection point for India’s academy. The country’s higher education institutions, especially the professoriate has to not only quickly master AI technologies but harness them to engineer technology breakthroughs and innovations urgently required to power massive productivity leaps in the Indian economy — agriculture, industry and government.
Against this backdrop, we present Part-I of our annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings 2025-26 in which we rate India’s best universities segregated into eight categories (to rank apples with apples) under eight-ten parameters of higher education excellence. Our partner for this exercise is the Bengaluru-based AZ Research Partners Ltd, a highly-reputed market research company. AZR interviewed 2,100 sample respondents (comprising HEI faculty, students and industry leaders countrywide) who rated universities/HEIs. Scores awarded by sample respondents under the parameters were totaled to rank them in each category.
Although universities/HEIs featured in the EW league tables struggle (especially since we exclude the well-respected IITs and IIMs) to feature in the Top 200 global rankings of highly-respected offshore varsity ranking agencies like QS, THE, Financial Times, they are India’s most respected HEIs and offer best hope of ideating and innovating game-changer technologies and socio-economic reforms that India urgently needs to attain the national goals of Viksit Bharat and $30 trillion GDP by 2047.
This issue also marks an inflection point for this pioneer publication in the education space promoted 25 years ago to “… make education the #1 item on the national agenda”. In a first for an Indian media publication, we have ventured abroad to rate and rank America’s Best Universities. For this unprecedented venture, we have partnered with Launchpad Rankings Llc, a company promoted by Raymond Ravaglia, a US-based education veteran and former Dean and director of Stanford University Pre-Collegiate Studies. With India’s 3.3 lakh school and college-leavers enrolled in America’s colleges/universities having surpassed China’s last year, selecting the most suitable HEIs in the US — a life-changing decision — is of critical importance to Indian students headed West. And with larger cohorts of Indian school-leavers signing up with American universities for undergrad education, the focus of the inaugural EW-Launchpad Rankings 2025 is on undergraduate education. We believe that university rankings published by QS, THE, FT among others, accord too much weightage to parameters such as research, faculty citations, admissions selectivity, internationalism — factors of peripheral value to undergrad students. That’s the differentiator of the inaugural EW-Launchpad Rankings of America’s Best Universities 2025.
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