Description
The national tables of the All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) final reports that count students by programme or by discipline rather than by state, for 2011-12 to 2015-16 and 2019-20 to 2023-24: enrolment by programme (all modes, and split into regular, distance, private and online study where the report does so), by male, female and social group (SC, ST and OBC every year; persons with disability, Muslim, other minorities and EWS in 2020-21 to 2022-23); undergraduate enrolment by discipline and subject; Ph.D., M.Phil. and postgraduate enrolment by discipline and subject; and out-turn (students passing out) by programme and by discipline. Each row is one report year, table, programme, discipline or subject, and column. In 2023-24, 4.43 crore students were enrolled in 263 programmes; B.A. alone had 1.09 crore, followed by B.Sc. (47 lakh), B.Com. (39 lakh) and B.Tech. (30 lakh), and 1.10 crore students passed out. Use it to follow how many students study a programme or subject across India over time; state and Kerala figures are in PRI-EDU-0025.
Methodology
1. Downloaded the AISHE final report Excel workbook for each year (he.nic.in/aishereport/assets/excel/<year>.xlsx; 2011-12 to 2015-16 from the Wayback Machine's copies of the Ministry of Education's workbooks) and kept it unchanged; these are the same files as PRI-EDU-0025.
2. Read every sheet that is not laid out by state with PRI's category-table reader: it finds the 'Programme', 'Discipline' or 'Country Name' heading, flattens the multi-row column headings into measures, keeps only the publisher's numbered columns, carries each discipline down to the subjects printed under it, and stops at the table's All India or Grand Total row (below it some years keep scratch copies).
3. Classified each table by topic (enrolment or out-turn), breakdown (programme or discipline) and mode of study from its title, because table numbers change between years. The table number comes from the sheet name, which keeps the sub-letter the title drops.
4. Prefixed undergraduate discipline measures with 'Under Graduate' to match the postgraduate tables, and turned headings printed in capitals into title case (ALL | Male -> All | Male).
5. Checked that the programme or subject rows add up to the total row in every table that has one, and logged the differences and repeated labels in PRI's AISHE quality table.
Known limitations
No workbooks exist for 2016-17 to 2018-19 (PDF only), so the series has a gap. Table numbers, titles, programme names and social-group columns change between years (for example out-turn by programme is Table 35 in 2011-12 and 34 later, and the disability, minority and EWS columns appear only in 2020-21 to 2022-23); select by topic, breakdown and mode, and check the title before comparing years. Column and programme names are as printed and not harmonised ('All' or 'All Categories', 'Other Backward Class' or 'Other Backward Classes'; 'M.Tech. -Master of Technology' beside the combined 'M.Tech. ... and Ph.D.' programme); the number of programmes listed grows from 176 in 2011-12 to 263 in 2023-24 partly because AISHE added programmes to its list. Enrolment-by-programme tables up to 2015-16 print no All India row. Figures are 'based on actual response': institutions that did not respond are missing, so totals are lower than AISHE's estimated enrolment in PRI-EDU-0025. A few tables do not add up as published: 2012-13 postgraduate out-turn by discipline is 7 short of its total, 2021-22 Ph.D. out-turn by discipline 22 over, 2022-23 distance enrolment by programme 28 short among men; in 2020-21 out-turn by programme lists M.A. and B.S. M.S. twice with different numbers (both kept, told apart by serial number). Discipline tables include subtotal rows: sum only item rows. Tables by type of university are not included. The file is over 50,000 rows, so Parquet is the main download. line_no is a row's position in that year's table, not a code: join years on category and subcategory (the publish check's year-on-year warnings compare lines and can be ignored).
