Chennai: Tamil Nadu which has the highest Gross Enrollment Ratio (GER) in higher education in the country has registered an increase of 2.6% to take GER to 46.9 per cent in 2016-17, according to the results of All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) released by the ministry of human resource development on Friday.

Almost half of the students in the age group of 18-23 years in the state are enrolling themselves into colleges.

Of nine lakh students who write plus-2 state board exam, over eight lakh students cleared it. Approximately 1.5 lakh are joining the engineering courses and around 3 lakh students joining arts and science, medicine, law and other courses.

Meanwhile, the country's gross enrolment ratio in higher education has witnessed an increase of 0.7 per cent as it raised from 24.5 per cent in 2015-16 to 25.2% in 2016-17. Totally 35.7 million students among the eligible age group (18-23 years) joined the higher educational institutions.

The number of universities in the country increased from 799 in 2015-16 to 864 in 2016-17. Though India's GER is increasing and aims to achieve 30 per cent in 2022, it is way behind when compared to countries like China (43.39 per cent) and US (85.80).

Puducherry tops the average enrolment per college with 549 students while Telangana has topped in the number of colleges (59 colleges) per one lakh eligible population. Bihar and Jharkhand lay at the bottom as they have 7 and 8 colleges per one lakh eligible population.

The survey also recorded there is only a marginal improvement in the number of foreign students increased only from 45,424 in 2015-16 to 45,575 in 2016-17.

Ramanathapuram has highest number of colleges next to Chennai

Higher education secretary Sunil Paliwal attributed the increase of enrolment to the increase in access to colleges.

"The enrollment increases when students have colleges within their reach. The state government has focused the educationally backward districts like Ramanathapuram and Dharmapuri while establishing new colleges and it yielded good results," he said.

"Now, after Chennai district, Ramanath apuram has the highest number of government colleges (6). In Dhar mapuri district, many university constituent colleges and government colleges recently opened," he added.