Personalized Re-Ranking of Universities and Colleges Using NIRF and JoSAA Data

The National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) provides a comprehensive evaluation of colleges across India based on various parameters such as teaching, learning, resources, research, and outreach. It integrates these parameters by giving a fixed priority to each of them. In today’s competitive academic landscape, choosing the right college is a crucial decision for students seeking higher education. This depends on several factors specific to each student such as their social background, location, economic status and rank in the qualifying examination, etc.This research introduces a novel approach to enhance the utility of NIRF data by creating user-specific rankings tailored to individual preferences. By incorporating user-defined criteria such as median salary, number of students placed, facilities for Physically Challenged Students (PCS), faculty strength, research funding, the proposed system generates personalized rankings that align with the unique needs and aspirations of each student.Our system utilizes a novel skyline-based approach and analyzes the NIRF data alongside user preferences to generate dynamic rankings that adapt to evolving student priorities. We show multiple use-cases to demonstrate the utility of our approach in real-world scenarios, and study the way colleges are ranked for different user preferences. Our study shows that the college rankings so obtained can be quite different from the standard NIRF ranking.