Education, Aristotle was fond of saying, is what makes the difference between the living and the dead. John Ruskin, the great Victorian social thinker, believed that education was "not teaching the youth the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers and leaving them to turn their arithmetic to roguery and their literature to lust but giving them training which makes them happiest in themselves".

ON THEIR OWN: The D'Silva family being led into the isolation ward at a hospital in Pune

In the coming weeks, five million Indian students entering college would be making the first big decision of their lives. It could spell the difference between a lifetime of happiness and of drudgery. Between fulfilment and frustration, prosperity and penury. It could lead them to discover their innate greatness and prepare them to face life's challenges with equanimity. Or it could make them lose their way into a world of ennui, pettiness and failure.

It is a difficult choice because it is a difficult era to live in. As Arun Kapur, director, Vasant Valley School, Delhi, told students who were finishing school this year, "We are living in times of unquiet history." It is, as Professor Anil Wilson, principal, St Stephen's College, Delhi, points out, "a period of tremendous confusion of values both in public life and at homes". Gone is the laid-back image of colleges as places of fun and freedom. It has been replaced by a frightening competitive scram where even securing 90 per cent is no big deal.

Getting admission into a good college is the first major hurdle. To guide youngsters through the maze of choices, India Today has since 1997 been conducting annual surveys of higher education institutions across the country to home in on academic excellence. In the absence of any such governmental exercise, these surveys provide the only objective sweep of India's 12,600 colleges and 214 universities. This year's results have seen some top colleges retain their slots, while others were nudged down. There are new entrants in the rarefied list too. There will be plenty of heartburn and disappointment. But for those who did not make it to the top, the encouraging news is that the difference between the best and the rest is narrowing. The introduction of factual rating from last year saw newer colleges challenge better known ones. This healthy trend continues.

The search for excellence is an unending quest as the principals of those who made it to the top reveal in the following pages. P.K. Dave, director of AIIMS, which is back as the No. 1 medical college, talks of commitment being the key. J.L. Gupta, principal of SRCC, which has remained Numero Uno in commerce since 1997, believes there is no room for complacency. These are the nation's quiet heroes.

Students who feel nervous about choosing a college could take heart from the example of the late Homi Bhabha, the visionary scientist and the father of India's nuclear prowess. Under pressure from his father in 1927, Bhabha sailed for England to study engineering at Cambridge. A year later, Bhabha wrote to his father, "The business or job as an engineer is not a thing for me. It is totally foreign to my nature. Physics is my line. I shall do great things here. For each man can excel in only that thing of which he is passionately fond of, in which he believes, as I do, that he has the ability to do it." Bhabha's father yielded and the rest is legend. For those transiting to adulthood, this is your shot at greatness.

Ever since INDIA TODAY began the surveys to identify centres of academic excellence seven years ago, it has constantly improved on the quality of the assessments. This year, as in 2002, we continue to bolster the subjective assessment of experts with factual inputs from colleges in the six streams under the scanner: arts, science, commerce, engineering, medicine and law.

The process began in November 2002 when The Gallup Organisation, our pollster, began compiling a long list of colleges a priori. This list was arrived at by including several colleges that had been mentioned in past surveys under the "others" list. Suggestions from distinguished academicians were also incorporated. The final list of around 400 colleges, while not exhaustive, was comprehensive. To ensure that we did not miss out on smaller colleges, respondents were allowed to mention colleges that may have been part of the "others" list.

For factual data, the Gallup team headed by Rajesh Srinivasan and R. Lakshmi sent out researchers to meet heads of departments, deans, registrars and even senior professors in some instances. To calculate the perceptual score this year, 449 experts at the level of principals, heads of departments and deans in Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Pune and Lucknow were contacted. They were given the list of colleges and were asked to mention the colleges they are aware of. The familiarity was captured on a 3-point scale. Next the respondents were asked to distribute 100 points across seven critical parameters: reputation, curriculum, academic input, student care, admission procedure, infrastructure, job/placement opportunities. The most important attribute got the maximum points and the least the minimum.

The respondents were then asked to rate around 10 colleges (selected randomly from the list of colleges they were aware of) on the set of parameters. In addition, they were asked to rate the colleges on some key overall measures, including advocacy. A net perceptual score was then determined for each college.

To get the factual scores, a module was developed around 35 parameters pertaining to four broad factors: admission (like the number of applicants, admission, pass percentage, placements, university ranks), academic standards (examination patterns, number and qualification of faculty, research work and awards won by faculty), infrastructure (number of courses, grants, number of pcs, library budget, residential facilities) and industry-college or, in the case of medical colleges, hospital-college interface. The final list had factual inputs from 350 colleges. All the parameters were rescaled to facilitate the computation of a single score. A 70:30 weightage was assigned to perceptual and factual data. These weights were applied to the respective net scores and the final ranks obtained.