India’s best professional colleges

A sample respondents base comprising 1,483 industry managers, 721 faculty of professional education institutions and 626 students enrolled in them, rated India’s top law, hospitality, fashion, mass communication and animation institutes

RIGHT UNTIL THE 1990s, entry into colleges of engineering, medicine, commerce and law was the preferred choice of the overwhelming majority of youth from upwardly mobile middle-class households. But after liberalisation and deregulation of the Indian economy in 1991 and the explosive growth of the ICT (information and communications technology) industries, a bouquet of professional education options in animation, business and finance, social and audio-visual media, travel and hospitality became available to the country’s youth.

Therefore to enable higher secondary school-leavers to make informed choices about non-medical/engineering professional education options available to them, last year coterminously with publication of EducationWorld’s league tables of non-IIT engineering colleges and non-IIM B-schools, we introduced league tables rating and ranking the country’s best institutes offering other professional qualifications. Although we have vetoed business school league tables this year because a large number of media publications rate and rank them, we have continued the practice of presenting league tables of colleges/institutes offering other professional study programmes.

Therefore, early this year we commissioned the well-known Delhi-based market research agency Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd. (C fore, estb. 2000) to rate and rank India’s top institutions in five fields of professional education — law, hotel management, fashion design, animation and mass communication.

To discharge this obligation, C fore managers constituted a sample respondents’ database comprising 1,483 industry managers, 721 faculty of professional education institutions and 626 students enrolled in them, and presented them with a structured questionnaire to rate institutes they were familiar with on a ten point scale across four broad parameters — competence of faculty, pedagogic systems and processes, placements, and infrastructure and support systems. They were also asked to allot appropriate weightage to each parameter in terms of relative importance.

“To eliminate bias, the rating respondents gave to their own institutes or alma maters were disregarded. The rating each institute received against the four parameters was totaled to rank colleges/institutes in each category,” explains Premchand Palety, promoter-CEO of C fore.

With several professional education institutions — government and private — still in their infancy, the league tables have been limited to the Top 20 and in some cases Top 15 and even Top 10. In the pages following, we present the all-India league tables of Top 20 hotel management institutes, law colleges, and fashion design institutions; Top 15 mass communication institutes, and Top 10 animation institutes.