The learning curve: QS rankings reflect gaps in education governance

India's slipping university ranks signal deep cracks in higher education quality - reforms must focus on academic freedom, research excellence, and teaching standards to stay globally competitive

The latest QS Asia University Rankings reflects the challenges India faces as it seeks to position itself as the services capital of the world. The country sees its status as a preferred location for the global capability centres of the world’s leading corporations as an indicator of its buoyant domestic intellectual capital. But the annual rankings collated by Quacquarelli Symonds, a global higher-education analytics firm, suggest that the country may not be able to count on this human resource without critically reforming its higher education. 

India not only lost its top place as the most represented higher-education system to China, several of its marquee institutions saw a significant drop. This year, 137 Indian universities entered the list, bringing the country’s total to 294. China’s energetic and enabling policy of promoting higher technical education can be seen in an addition of 261 institutions, making a total of 395. No Indian institution made it to the top 10; those rankings were filled by Hong Kong, China, and Singapore, the emerging hub of global innovation. In contrast, India’s top-performing university was the Indian Institute of Technology (Delhi), or IIT Delhi, which weighed in at 59, a drop of 15 places from 44 last year. IIT Bombay dropped from 48 in 2025 to 71, and IIT Kharagpur dropped from 60 last year to 77. All the major IITs — including Madras and Kanpur — recorded their lowest ranks since at least 2021. Of the seven institutions that figure in India’s top 10 rankings, only Chandigarh University improved, from 120 to 109. No Indian university is ranked in the top 100 globally, although several from China figure among them, including Peking University at rank 14. 

The irony of this poor showing is that it comes at a time when the Indian government has introduced several reforms in higher education over the past decade — greater governing autonomy for the IITs, relaxed norms for central universities to raise resources, and easing the path for the entry of foreign universities. None of this has encouraged Indian students to stay at home for higher studies. According to government data, the number of Indian students studying abroad has touched 1.8 million this year, up from 1.3 million in 2023. This steady surge abroad is as much a function of the limited seats available in top Indian institutions as of the job opportunities available in these jurisdictions. These trends point to a serious quality deficit in Indian higher education, suggesting that both central and state universities need to pay attention to teaching standards and resources. 

This is true not just for institutions focused on technical and scientific research, which the QS ranking criteria appear to favour, but also for the arts and humanities. The neglect of the latter cannot be downplayed. But rising intervention in university appointments and attempts to harness curricula to specific ideologies by central and state political administrations have steadily undermined the integrity and quality of higher education. Increasingly, talented academics and the best students look elsewhere for opportunities for better-resourced independent research. A neutral but enabling environment for research, whether in the arts or sciences, is the sweet spot for which India should be aiming.