India's 100 best universities

Careers360 ranks 100 public and 35 private universities for overall excellence, another 710 for excellence in one or more of 11 academic domains, and 100 institutions for research.

- Aeshwarya Tiwari

By February 2025, the Careers360 database of degree-awarding institutions had expanded to around 1,375.

This year, we shortlisted nearly 800 degree-awarding institutions for in-depth analysis. The shortlisting criteria were primarily based on a literature review of inter-nationally-indexed publications, including Elsevier's Scopus and Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science. Also, institutions with at least 10 publications between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2024, were considered.

These institutions were evaluated based on citations per paper, H-index, intellectual property rights (IPR), incubation activities, and total publications. We also assigned weightage to research agreements with other institutions and corporations for IP-related activities. This year, a small weightage was also assigned to the Google Scholar database. In another change, the number of institutions ranked for engineering and multi-disciplinary categories has increased. The idea is to provide as fair a judgement of institutions as public data allows.

Accreditations, such as National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) scores, were given greater weightage. Other parameters included student-faculty ratio, infrastructure, residential facilities, annual budgets, and student diversity. Residential facilities were assessed using the latest All India Survey on Higher Education (AISHE) data; where details were unavailable, previous years’ averages were used, supplemented by data on websites.

In the “overall” category, a total of 100 public and 35 private institutions have been ranked, including private deemed-to-be and private state universities, with scores calculated out of 700.