Progress of higher education system in India: Emerging issues and challenges

Abstract

Higher education provides specialized knowledge and skilled persons for national development. In next few decades, India will have world’s largest set of young people. While the correlation between people and higher education is not up to the mark. The study is based on secondary data from collected from sources like Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India (website: http://mhrd.gov.in/statist) and reports. Number of university level institutions and colleges has grown up from 28 to 677 and 578 to 3800 respectively from 1951 to 2014. There is mushrooming growth in higher education institutions at the end of 2014 there were 677 Universities and 38000 colleges in India. But still we need more than 1500 universities to cater the demand. Other than the government support for higher education has been declined. The Union and state governments are the major contributors to the funding of higher education. These funds are channelized to the institution of higher learning in the form of grants like maintenance/block grants, non-recurring grants, developmental grants etc. In this context, the UGC has an important role to play. Hence, we have highlighted certain aspects of the administrative structure of the higher education system at the state and university levels.