The Azim Premji University recently released its annual report, The State of Working India, 2026. The report explores different aspects of the labour market in India. It rightly emphasises that even as education has its own intrinsic value, where you learn what you learn, how long you learn ‘determines employment and earnings’ not just at the time of your entry into the job market but also over your entire lifetime.

Accordingly, the report devotes an entire chapter analysing different aspects of higher education in India and their impact on an individual’s employment prospects and outcomes.

While the detailed and nuanced report deserves to be read in full, I propose to sum up two key aspects of higher education in India, as described in the report. In this column, I would sum up factors affecting access to higher education for the young, and in the next column, I would briefly describe one key parameter of quality education: the student-teacher ratio and how it has changed over time in institutions of higher education in India.

Expansion of higher education with persistent disparities

In the past four decades, India’s higher education system has experienced a remarkable shift and expansion from a relatively small, elitist, almost exclusively state-funded system in the 1990s to one of the largest in the world, with more than 58,000 institutions of higher education and about 4.3 crore students, with widening access to students not only from relatively poor backgrounds, economically and........

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