New Delhi: Bangalore is known as Silicon Valley of India due to the presence of large number of technology companies. It has another feature in its cap. Bangalore district has the highest number of colleges in India with 948 colleges. Jaipur district features at the second spot with 590 colleges in India. Top 50 districts in India represent about 35% of colleges, revealed by All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2014-15 final report, prepared by Ministry of HRD.
Hyderabad district is on the third place with 496 colleges while Pune occupies fourth place with 472 colleges. Nagpur and Rangareddy (Telangana) both tied at fifth position with 445 number of colleges each. Mumbai district has 342 colleges and placed seventh place. The other top ten districts having highest number of colleges are as followed: Bhopal (eighth place, 333 colleges), Chittoor of Andhra Pradesh (ninth place, 310 colleges) and Nalgonda of Telangana (tenth place, 300 colleges).
Among top ten districts having highest number of colleges, four are from South India (Bangalore, Rangareddy, Chittoor, and Nalgonda) while three from Maharashtra (Pune, Nagpur and Mumbai).
As per AISHE 2014-15, college density, i.e. the number of colleges per lakh eligible population (population in the age-group 18-23 years) varies from 7 in Bihar (lowest) to 60 in Telangana (highest). College density at All India average stands at 27. Nearly 58% colleges are located in Rural Area while 10.7% colleges are exclusively for women.
Out of 38498 colleges in India very few offer PhD programmes as only 1.7% colleges run PhD programme. On the other hand nearly 33% colleges offer Post Graduate Level programmes.
At college level education, private institutes dominate higher education system. There are more than 77% colleges running in Private sector; aided and unaided taken together, but it caters to only 67% of the total enrolment. Nearly 23% colleges represent government run colleges, which cater to 33% of total enrolment. This reflects the government colleges are still popular destination for college study.
The annual survey report of AISHE 2014-15 mentioned that surprisingly 19.1% of colleges are having enrolment less than 100 students. On the other hand only 4.4% colleges have enrolment more than 3000 students.
