BHUBANESWAR: State’s gross enrolment ratio (GER) in higher education has further dipped.
According to the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2020-2021 released recently by the Ministry of Education, the GER came down to 20.7 against national average of 27.3 in 2020-21 when the state was reeling under the Covid-19 crisis.
GER, which is the total enrolment in higher education in the age group of 18 to 23, was 20.2 back in 2016-17. It had touched 22.1 in 2017-18 and 2018-19 but decreased to 21.7 in 2019-20. The state has 48.5 lakh students pursuing higher education currently and 46,690 of them are in state public universities, 13,067 in the lone State Open University at Sambalpur.
“Like the adolescent age group in schools, many college and university going youths might have been forced to give up on higher education due to various reasons during the Covid pandemic. However, this enrolment gap can be plugged with opening of various courses and increasing the seats in this new session,” said a vice-chancellor, requesting anonymity.
The report reveals that in the academic year 2020-21, while more girls (50,344) did their PG as compared to boys (48,874) and MPhil (378 girls against 352 boys), their numbers came down by the time they reached PhD level. As against 1,955 boys, only 1,326 girls pursued PhD.
The trend was more or less similar in the previous academic sessions. However, the gender parity index, which is the ratio of female GER to male GER, though, has seen a rise from 0.88 per cent in the 2019-20 academic year to 0.94 in 2020-21.
The pupil-teacher ratio in higher education institutions also came down by one point to 24 pc as compared to 2019-20 session when it was 25 pc.
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