The Ministry of Human Resources Development, Government of India has come up with National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) to rank all educational institutions of higher education in India. I tried to dig deeper and do some research on my own to find out if this will help us build a better education system for us in the country.

NIRF is a framework ranking our education institutions on the basis of 5 parameters with each of them consisting of few metrics. You can know more about the methodology in this document .

Why we don't need NIRF ?

Its measuring too many things and the intent is not very clear From the NIRF website and their wikipedia page and numerous other sources, it is pretty clear that it is just a framework to rank our educational institutions. I had expected this to be more than just a framework and as a basis towards other goals like fostering research work, improving student graduation rates, encouraging inclusivity, etc. However, it is very unclear how we are going to use these metrics to gain any actionable insight towards a goal which there seems is none as of now. This is as good as saying that Virat Kohli has scored more runs than Sachin Tendulkar did in his first 50 test matches. It is a good piece of trivia, but does not help either of them in becoming better players. We all know it is not good for a team when individual players start chasing personal milestones. These stats on their own are not enough to compare Kohli with Tendulkar but they give us an idea and are hence proxy indicators and not direct measures.

Proxy metrics are often misleading It is good that these metrics are taking into account important factors like graduation rate, placement rate, inclusion, research, etc. but none of these metrics are giving you an idea about what I think is the most important metric - what the students have learned. Since proxy metrics are just rough indicators this also makes it very easy to game them. In the same way how more Instagram followers does not "always" imply a great photographer. It is not uncommon for us to lose the real picture while chasing proxies. Our quality of education has suffered because we have been chasing proxy metrics like grades, ranks and GPAs and the real value in learning has taken a backseat. The parameters within the framework are good goals to strive for but should not be at the expense of quality education. If any institution is improving its metrics and its rank might still fail if others are growing at a much faster rate. This has happened with Texas Christian University where their ranking has fallen even after improving their metrics year on year. This system fails to acknowledge improvement of an institution in isolation.