The End of the Affiliated College
India has more colleges than any country on earth, but most of them are not really colleges. They are administrative outposts. Over 46,000 institutions sit inside the affiliation system. They teach four out of five college students in India, but 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 run a handful of tiny elite schools. Today, it processes over three crore young people. It is breaking under the weight.
In 2020, the national education policy gave this structure an expiration date. By 2035, the affiliation system must 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 higher education. In practice, it forces a long-overdue sorting.
To see why this phase-out is necessary, look at what the affiliation system actually produced. Over seventy percent of affiliated colleges have never been accredited. They operate completely in the dark. Among the self-selected group that actually applies for national rankings, nearly a third of colleges 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, while state universities collect affiliation fees to keep their own administrative lights on.
This creates a quiet crisis for state public universities. For decades, institutions like Mumbai, Osmania, or Pune have not acted primarily as places of higher learning. They have operated as massive examination factories. Their main source of revenue is not state funding or research grants; it is the stream of registration and exam fees collected from hundreds of affiliated colleges. If you take away affiliation, you strip these universities of their primary business model. They will have to choose what they want to be. A few hundred can become genuine teaching and research universities. Some will become holding companies for merged clusters of colleges. The rest will shrink into specialized testing boards. Most state governments have not even begun to plan for this revenue shock.
How fast will the system actually change? We already saw a smaller version of this play out in private engineering colleges. Between peak capacity and a complete moratorium on new seats, it took roughly eight years. Once students realized low-quality engineering degrees led nowhere, demand collapsed, and unviable colleges began closing or freezing admissions. The general degree market will react slower because tuition is cheaper and options are fewer, but the underlying mechanics are the same.
By the late 2020s, demographic shifts and student preferences will accelerate this trend. Over-colleged districts will see falling enrolments. The weakest institutions will quietly exit because household budgets cannot keep subsidizing degrees with zero economic value. Public money will not bail them out. Households already pay for ninety-five percent of college expenses in India, while government spending on higher education remains stuck below three percent of GDP.
By 2035, the total number of higher education institutions in India will fall significantly, plausibly by a third or more from today's sixty-five thousand. At the same time, the average size of the surviving institutions will multiply. Instead of thousands of tiny colleges offering broken degrees, India will have fewer, much larger autonomous colleges and multidisciplinary cluster universities. A massive online degree sector will absorb a quarter or more of total enrolment.
This swap is entirely to India's benefit. We will stop being the country with the most colleges and start being the country with the most learners. The sorting is inevitable because the current format has run out of runway. Over the next decade, every college in India will have to answer a simple question: can you offer enough real value to stand on your own, or were you only surviving on someone else's brand?