Vivekananda Scholarship | 04 May 2024

Why in News?

Rajasthan has chosen to reduce the funding for the Swami Vivekananda Scholarship for Academic Excellence, originally established by the former government as the Rajiv Gandhi Scholarship for Academic Excellence.

Key Points

  • Students with a yearly family income exceeding Rs 8 lakh will now need to pay a part of the tuition fee starting from the next academic session.
  • The scholarship covered the full tuition fees for 500 talented students from different income groups. It consisted of 300 scholarships for students studying overseas and 200 scholarships for those joining the top 50 institutes in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings.
    • Even though the higher education department suggested that students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds should pay 10% of the tuition fee, the finance department rejected this proposal.
    • Instead, students falling into the higher income brackets, with family earnings ranging from Rs 8 lakh to Rs 25 lakh, and those exceeding Rs 25 lakh, will now have to pay 15% and 30% of the tuition fee, respectively.

National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings

  • About:
    • The NIRF is a methodology to rank institutions across the country based on various parameters.
    • NIRF was approved by the Ministry of Education (Erstwhile Ministry of Human Resource Development) and launched on 29th September 2015.
    • It is the first-ever effort by the government to rank Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) in the country.
  • Parameters for NIRF Ranking: The weightage for each parameter varies depending on the category of the institution.

QS World University Rankings

  • QS World University Rankings are released annually by Quacquarelli Symonds (QS).
  • The rankings evaluate the performance and quality of universities worldwide.
  • The methodology considers indicators such as academic reputation, faculty-student ratio, employer reputation, sustainability, employment outcomes, international research network, citations per faculty, international faculty ratio, and international student ratio.
  • They provide rankings by subject, region, student city, business school, and sustainability.