AISHE Survey: BTech Enrollment Falls To An All-Time Low, BA Reigns!

Do you think engineering is still the hot favorite of students these days? Think again! According to the latest edition of the All India Higher Education Survey (AISHE), student enrollment in engineering programs in full-time courses has dropped by 10% in 2020-21. Having said this, the overall admission numbers have increased in all other programs at the Bachelor’s level. Let’s look at the core highlights of this latest report released by the Education Ministry. 

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All India Higher Education Survey: Facts and Figures

• About 4.1 crore students entered the undergraduate gateway in 2020-21 out of which over 1 crore opted for BA programmes. 
• For the undergraduate level, enrollment was highest in humanities (about 33%), followed by science (15%), commerce (14%), and engineering & technology (12%). At the postgraduate level, the maximum number of students opted for social science followed by science. 
• Engineering witnessed an overall downward trend in enrollment which dropped by 10% from 40.85 lakh in 2016-17 to 36.63 lakh in 2020-21.
• With regard to science courses, 55,48,809 students enrolled for undergraduate, post-graduate, MPhil, and Ph.D. 
• A noteworthy point is that females outnumbered males in science courses. 48,17,826 students enrolled in science undergraduate courses and 52% were females. For post-graduate courses, out of a total of 6,79,178 students enrolled in science, 61.3% were females.
• Chemistry has the highest enrollment in post-graduation with 1,53,635 students, of which 52.3% were females followed by mathematics with a total enrollment of 1,04,269. 
• The commerce stream had 5.36 lakh students enrolled for post-graduate courses. Amongst them, 66.5% were females. 
• The enrollment of girls in engineering programmes is substantially low when compared to their male counterparts. Overall in UG, PG, MPhil, and Ph.D. engineering programmes, the total enrollment is 36,86,291 where 71% of enrolled students were males and 29% were females.
• The number of Universities has increased by 70 (1043 to 1113 in 2020-21). The top 10 states with regard to number of colleges are Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Telangana, and Kerala are the top 10 States in terms of the number of colleges.

Why is engineering losing its sheen? Some factors that can be held responsible are lack of an updated curriculum, unregulated opening of technical institutions, non-existent linkages with industry resulting in skill gap, poor student-faculty ratio, etc. 

With AISHE figures out, we can say that significant gains have been made in bridging the gender gap across different undergraduate programmes. Gender Parity Index (GPI) has increased from 1 in 2017-18 to 1.05 in 2020-21 taking India a step ahead in the socio-economic ladder. We hope the progressive link continues in the years to come.

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