Low teacher-student ratio may be reason for DU’s slip in NIRF rankings

Lack of enough permanent teachers leading to a low teacher-student ratio; fewer faculty with PhD experience; poor utilisation of financial resources and assistance for economically and socially-challenged students; and fewer patents and research project outputs are some of the reasons why Delhi University and some of its colleges slipped in the National Institutional Ranking Framework’s (NIRF) 2021 report released on Thursday, showed an analysis by HT.

In the NIRF’s 2021 report, released by the education ministry on Thursday, Delhi University was ranked 12th — down from 11th last year— behind the national capital’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Jamia Millia Islamia, which secured the second and sixth ranks, respectively.

Acting vice-chancellor PC Joshi and registrar Vikas Gupta said the university fared well on all metrics except recruitment of permanent teachers. “While we did well in the research category, we scored less due to the low teacher-student ratio. In the absence of recruitments, there are about 850 vacant teaching positions and that is affecting the teacher-student ratio,” the V-C said.

University officials also said that due to the lengthy nature of the recruitment process and red tape, the number of teachers appointed during the previous University administration was low. Joshi took over as acting vice-chancellor in October last year and has recruited 44 teachers so far.

To deal with the problem, DU has been appointing ad hoc teachers on a contract basis, renewable after every four months. Currently, they number about 4,100 and constitute nearly 40% of the university’s teaching strength of around 10,000 – way higher than the limit of 10% set by the government.

Rama Sharma, principal of Hansraj College, which moved down five places in the college ranking to settle at 14th position, said they will be analysing the results to ascertain the reason for the drop. “We will analyse and see where we scored less. As far as low teacher-student ratio is concerned, it is difficult to say how much it impacted the college-wise scores, since several DU colleges face this issue.”

According to figures released by DU teachers’ association (DUTA) last month, Hansraj has nearly 120 permanent faculty members and 53 ad hoc teachers. The figures for Miranda House, which topped the NIRF college ranking list for the fifth consecutive year, isn’t much different; the college has nearly 130 permanent faculty and 59 ad hoc teachers.

Launched by the ministry of human resource development (now ministry of education) in 2016, NIRF is a framework to rank higher education institutions across the country based on parameters of teaching learning and resources (30% weightage), research and professional practices (30%), graduation outcomes (20%), outreach and inclusivity (10%), and perception (10%).

Simrit Kaur, principal of Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) that was ranked 10th this year, said there are several factors influencing the ranking of colleges. “While higher teacher-student ratio forms a major part of the score, there are other factors such as how scores are calculated for a sub-parameter. Also, NIRF rankings are not stream-wise — so commerce colleges are competing with science colleges. We have also noticed that research is getting marks but book publication is not getting any advantage. Most SRCC authors are national-level writers but that doesn’t carry weightage,” she said.

A detailed analysis of the scores awarded to the three central universities of the capital – DU, JNU, and Jamia Millia Islamia – under 15 sub-components of the five main parameters brings to fore reasons for DU’s slip in the list.

For instance, DU has a combined score of 25.01 out of 80 points under the three sub-categories of faculty-student ratio with emphasis on permanent faculty (FSR), combined metric for Faculty with PhD (or equivalent) and Experience (FQE), and Financial Resources and their Utilisation (FRU). This score is low compared to Jamia’s 47.45 and JNU’s 50.7 in the same sub-categories.

In the outreach and inclusivity parameter, which looks at diversity in terms of gender and students from other states and countries; facilities for physically challenged students and economically challenged students, DU scored 59.59 points out of 100 while JNU and Jamia scored 73.36 and 72.35 points, respectively.

However, in the research and professional practice category, NIRF scores indicate that DU has more publications, citations, patents, and output-oriented projects than both JNU and Jamia. However, all three universities have scored abysmally low in the patents and output-oriented subcategories — their scores are in the range of four to seven points out of 30.