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India's four-year UG push hits 56% university adoption
Only 56% of India's 2,200 universities offer four-year UG degrees. NIRF participation lags at 55%. The Education Ministry eyes state-university conversions for the 2025-26 academic year.
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A government survey covering 57.5 million enrolled students found that only 56% of India's universities offer a four-year undergraduate degree, five years after the National Education Policy 2020 recommended the shift.
The All India Survey on Higher Education for 2023-24, released Wednesday, shows 1,211 out of roughly 2,200 universities have adopted the four-year structure. Roughly 44% still offer the traditional three-year bachelor's program.
The NIRF participation rate also lags. Just 55% of universities – around 1,200 institutions – submitted their data to the National Institutional Ranking Framework. That gap means a significant share of the country's higher education capacity remains outside the government's primary ranking system.
Two numbers stand out as bottlenecks. First, the NIRF coverage problem: among the roughly 45% of universities that did not participate, many are smaller state-run institutions that lack the administrative bandwidth or consistent data-collection infrastructure to file annual returns. Second, the four-year adoption rate, which has inched up from roughly 50% in 2022-23 but still leaves about 900 universities running the old three-year model.