Ending the Affiliated College System in India
India has more colleges than any country on earth, but most of them are not really colleges. They are administrative outposts. Over forty-six thousand institutions sit inside what we call the affiliation system. They teach four out of five higher education students in India, yet they do not design their own courses, set their own exams, or grant their own degrees. A single state public university often oversees six hundred or eight hundred of these satellites. The British designed this setup in the nineteenth century to administer a handful of elite schools. Today, it processes over thirty million young people. The model is breaking under its own weight.
To see why this setup must end, look at what it actually produced. Over seventy percent of affiliated colleges have never been accredited by national evaluation bodies. They operate completely in the dark. Among the self-selected group that voluntarily applies for national rankings, nearly a third publish zero research papers. Most affiliated colleges are tiny, underfunded, and academically dead. They survive because local politicians and private promoters use them as low-cost real estate plays. Meanwhile, state public universities collect registration and affiliation fees from them to keep their own administrative lights on.
In 2020, national policy gave this arrangement an expiration date. By 2035, the affiliation system is scheduled to end. Every college must either become an autonomous degree-granting institution, merge into a larger university cluster, or shut down. On paper, this is the most radical policy decision in the history of Indian education. In practice, it forces a long-overdue sorting.
The general degree colleges at the bottom of the pyramid face existential contraction. Their teaching is commoditized. Their degree is being repriced by the market. Their campus life consists of little more than a daily bus ride to a dead classroom. The two pillars that kept them alive—the hope of passing a government service exam and local proximity—are shrinking. Students are learning that a cheap online degree combined with a specialized coaching center yields better results at lower cost. The first sign of failure for these colleges will not be shuttered gates. It will be hollowing out: enrollments falling below viability while the legal license persists. They will become zombies.
The deeper crisis, however, hides inside the state public universities themselves. For decades, institutions like Mumbai, Osmania, or Pune have not acted primarily as centers of scholarship. They have operated as massive examination factories. Their main source of revenue is not state funding or research grants. It is the steady stream of fee income collected from hundreds of affiliated colleges. If you eliminate affiliation, you strip these flagship public universities of their primary business model.
This forces a sharp choice that state governments have tried to ignore. Public universities will resolve into three destinies. A small tier—perhaps a hundred institutions with strong legacy faculty and real land—can become genuine teaching and research universities. A second tier will become holding companies for merged clusters of regional colleges. The rest will shrink into specialized testing boards. Most state finance departments have not begun to calculate this revenue shock. They are acting as if the money will keep flowing while the structural pipes are being removed.
To manage this shift without breaking the system, we need earned autonomy as a default career path for colleges, not a privilege handed out by administrative favor. We already have graded autonomy rules, but they must operate like an escalator. Demonstrate sound academic outcomes and financial integrity at one step, and you automatically receive greater freedom at the next—freedom over curriculum, fee structures, and credentialing. Regulate the unproven institutions strictly. Free the proven ones completely. Let full degree-granting independence be the top step. That is how you phase out affiliation without causing institutional panic.
By the time this sorting finishes, the total count of higher education institutions in India will fall significantly, perhaps by a third or more from today's numbers. But average institution size will grow severalfold. India will trade tens of thousands of weak administrative outposts for larger, stronger, and more capable hubs. We will stop being the country with the most colleges and start being the country with the most educated learners. That is a swap we should make without hesitation.