With over 1058 colleges, Bangalore Urban district topped the list of districts with the highest number of colleges registered, as per the union education ministry’s All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE). Bangalore Urban was followed by Jaipur, which came a distant second with 671 colleges.
The report reveals that the top ten districts accounted for 10.7% of all the colleges registered. The top 50 districts, however, have 32.0% of colleges registered.
Apart from Bangalore Urban and Jaipur, among the top 10 cities are Hyderabad (488 colleges), Pune (466 colleges), Prayagraj (374 colleges), Rangareddy (345 colleges), Bhopal (327 colleges), Nagpur (318 colleges), Ghazipur (316 colleges), and Sikar (308 colleges).
In addition to that, Karnataka was next to Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra in the list of the top 10 states with the highest number of colleges. Other states in the top 10 include
Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana and Kerala; each of these states have at least 29 or more colleges per lakh population.
UP, which has 8,114 colleges in all, has over 32 colleges for every one lakh population, and Maharashtra, with 4532 colleges has 34 colleges per lakh population. Karnataka has 4,233 colleges but its college density stands much higher with 62 Colleges per lakh population. With 3,694 colleges and a density of 40 colleges, Rajasthan is at the fourth position.
The report also states that most of the Colleges run only undergraduate level programmes, and only 2.9% colleges run PhD level programmes and 55.2% colleges have post-graduate programmes. “There are 35.8% Colleges, which run only single programme, out of which 82.2% are privately managed. Among these, 30.9% colleges run B.Ed. Courses only,” reads the report.
In addition to that, of the 41,600 colleges that participated in the survey, 8903 (21.4%) are government colleges, 5,658 (13.3%) are private (aided) and 27,039 (65%) are private (unaided).