- 2.2 crore girl students enrolled in higher education.
The picture of higher education in the country is changing rapidly. Now daughters are continuously maintaining their lead in the matter of admission in colleges and universities. According to the latest data of All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) 2023-24, this is the seventh consecutive year when the enrollment of girl students in higher education has been more than that of boys. Not only this, even in major STEM subjects like Science, the number of girl students has been recorded to be more than that of boys.
According to the report, the female gross enrollment ratio (GER) in higher education in the year 2023-24 was 31.2 percent, while the GER of men was recorded at 28.9 percent. For this reason the Gender Parity Index (GPI) reached 1.08. GPI being more than 1 indicates that participation of women in higher education is more than that of men. The special thing is that this figure has continuously remained above 1 since the year 2017-18.
There has been a significant increase in the number of girl students in the last few years. In comparison to 2014-15, the number of women studying in higher education has increased to 2.2 crore in 2023-24. This is an increase of about 42.2 percent, which was faster than that of men. There was good participation of girl students from Scheduled Caste (SC) and Scheduled Tribe (ST) category in the survey. GPI of SC category was recorded 1.11 and GPI of ST category was 1.08. This means that even in these classes, girl students are moving rapidly towards higher education.
Crossed the 1 crore mark
Talking about Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics i.e. STEM subjects, the number of students studying in these courses has crossed the figure of one crore for the first time. A total of 1,01,88,988 students enrolled in STEM subjects in 2023-24. These include about 57 lakh men and 44.8 lakh women.
The most popular subject within STEM was science, in which more than 55.55 lakh students are studying. The share of girl students in this subject was 54.6 percent, which means that girls have now overtaken boys in science. At the post-graduate level, this participation further increased to 61.4 percent.
However, the gender gap still persists in engineering and technology. A total of 46.33 lakh students were enrolled in this field, but the share of girls at the graduation level was only 31.1 percent. This means that there is still a lot of scope for increasing the participation of girls in engineering.
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Computer engineering was the most preferred course among engineering branches, in which more than 18.4 lakh students took admission. This was followed by Electronics, Mechanical and Civil Engineering. At the same time, courses related to new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning (AI & ML) and Artificial Intelligence and Data Science are also becoming increasingly popular. For the first time, these two subjects were included as separate categories in the AISHE survey.
Science also remained at the forefront in the field of research. Among the 3.43 lakh PhD researchers registered in the country, maximum 23.4 percent are related to science subjects. This was followed by Engineering and Technology and Social Science. The report also revealed that the number of universities dedicated to women in the country has increased to 18, whereas in 2014-15 this number was 11.
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