The idea of ranking colleges (‘Rating of colleges likely soon’, September 20), a proposal mooted by the HRD ministry, sounds very good on paper, but needs to be examined with some amount of care. Credit rating agencies have no particular expertise when it comes to ranking of institutions in terms of the knowledge they provide — raters are best when it comes to looking at financial projections. And, as the US experience shows, they’re not very good at that either. Ideally, if colleges have to be ranked, this has to be done, over a period of time, by organisations that hire people from these colleges; the ranking has to be done by students; it has to take into account the salaries that those passing out of these colleges are able to command in the market place; it has to be based on the quality of the faculty, the alumnus, and so on — the Shanghai Composite Index is one example of how universities are to be ranked, and the model could just as well be tweaked to suit the Indian situation.
Salil Tripathi, New Delhi