Of the top 10 universities in the country (as ranked by the National Institute Ranking Framework), just three have 22.5% of more SC/ ST students. Another three have over half girl students. Delhi’s much-maligned Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) is the only one to do well on both counts.

Across the 21 Indian Institutes of Technology, under 19% of enrolled students in 2018-19 were SC or ST, and an even smaller proportion were female. The drop-out rate from IITs is slightly higher among SC students than among forward caste students, the public data journalism portal Factly has found.

Dalit students at IITs have reported facing caste-based discrimination, and record poorer academic performances than their forward caste peers even after controlling for socio-economic backgrounds, World Bank economist Priyanka Pandey and social activist Sandeep Pandey have found.

The situation is not very different at the prestigious Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs). At the 19 IIMs, 16% of students are SC or ST, and a quarter are female. At the six All India Institutes of Medical Sciences, just under 20% of students are SC or ST, and nearly half of all students enrolled in 2018-19 were female.

Access to education matters most for historically marginalized castes because such access can change their job prospects dramatically, and give them a real shot at climbing up the socio-economic ladder, which remains stacked against the less-educated in modern India.

It is worth noting however that education does not fully level the playing field for marginalized groups. Dalit respondents to job advertisements were less likely to be called up than upper caste respondents with the same qualifications, the economists Sukhadeo Thorat and Paul Attewell found in a field experiment. The AISHE data also offers some insight into what young women are choosing to study, and indicates that they are breaking major barriers in higher education at a historic pace.

For the last two years (2017-18 and 2018-19), the number of female students enrolling in higher education in the sciences has exceeded that of male students, even though the total number of male students in higher education still exceeds the number of female students. This is a reversal of the earlier trend where male students led female students in enrollment in the sciences.