More graduates in south than north

The southern states had a distinctly higher percentage of their population completing graduation than their northern counterparts in 2011, recently released census data show.

Taking the age group of 20-24 as the optimum age for graduating, the data showed Kerala had 20.1 per cent of its population in this range as graduates, followed by Tamil Nadu (18.4 per cent) and Andhra Pradesh (16.6 per cent).

In the north, Punjab had 15 per cent of its population in 20-24 years as graduates, followed by Rajasthan at 10.8 per cent and Haryana at 6.8 per cent.

A higher percentage of women graduated in the southern states, with almost 60 per cent of all graduating individuals being female in Kerala. The census divides college or equivalent education into graduate, technical diploma and non-technical diploma courses.

Kerala also had 23.38 per cent of its female population as graduates. Tamil Nadu had 18.3 per cent and undivided Andhra Pradesh had 13.91 per cent. In the north, Punjab bettered Andhra but was behind the other southern states. Gujarat, then run by a Narendra Modi government, was somewhere in the middle. About 12.5 per cent of its population in the 20-24 age group were graduates, while 9.8 per cent of its female population held a degree or its equivalent.

Men still beat women to technical and non-technical diploma courses, across states. Though, that gap has dwindled over time, evident from the fact that the number of women with technical diplomas (not degrees) was nearly 1.9 million, up 146 per cent in a decade. The number of men with these qualifications was 5.3 million.

States with a conventionally higher per capita earning or those conventionally considered more developed had generally pipped their poorer counterparts. Poorer states scored low, with Jharkhand having 7.9 per cent of the population in the category as graduates, followed by Odisha at 6.9 per cent and Bihar at 6.6 per cent.

However, Haryana bucked this trend, with other social factors at play.

India had 13.1 million graduates in 2011. This is a marginal increase of one percentage point over the earlier census. The overwhelming majority of students are seen to be pursuing simple graduate courses, although the gap between technical and non-technical education has narrowed over the past decade.

Figures issued by the National Sample Survey Office in June had corroborated this trend. These showed that of every 1,000 eligible students, i.e in the age bracket of 15-29 years, an overwhelming 850 students were pursuing general studies. The survey, conducted only across a select number of households nationally, reported a further 126 attended technical or professional courses, while 24 were enrolled in vocational courses.