PhD enrolment jumps 47%, STEM share edges up

NEW DELHI: With 76.8% of total enrolment, India’s higher education system remains overwhelmingly undergraduate, but the AISHE 2023-24 data suggest gradual deepening above the bachelor’s level and a modest shift towards professional and technical streams.Undergraduate courses still dominate the system, accounting for 76.8% of total enrolment in 2023-24. Postgraduate programmes account for 12.9%. But the time-series data in the report show that between 2019-20 and 2023-24, UG enrolment grew at a compound annual growth rate of 2.4%, while PG enrolment grew faster at 6.1%.The sharpest movement is at the research level. PhD enrolment is reported at 3.44 lakh in 2023-24, up from 2.33 lakh in 2022-23 — an unusually steep one-year rise of about 47%.

The increase may indicate expanding research participation, but the scale of the jump is large enough to merit closer scrutiny in future AISHE rounds.Course choices are also shifting at the margin. At the UG level, Arts remains the largest discipline, but its share fell from 34.0% in 2022-23 to 32.1% in 2023-24. Engineering and Technology rose from 11.9% to 12.9%, while Science stood at 13.5% and Commerce at 12.0%.

At the PG level, Social Science remained the largest stream, but its share dropped from 21.5% in 2022-23 to 18.6% in 2023-24. Management rose from 15.6% to 18.2%, while Science increased from 13.5% to 15.1%.STEM enrolment also edged up, from 99.8 lakh or 22.0% of actual-response enrolment in 2022-23 to about 1.02 crore or 22.5% in 2023-24. The report notes that in the Science stream, “females have out-numbered males.”The broad hierarchy has not changed: Arts and general degrees still dominate. But the direction of movement shows a system slowly tilting towards PG, research, STEM and management-linked programmes.