India has made significant progress in terms of gross enrollment (GER) in higher education with GER of 24.5% in 2015-16 from 20.8% in 2011-12. However, the quality and standards for tertiary education remain abysmal. For instance, recently, a report by McKinsey stated that only a quarter of engineers in India were actually employable.
This impacts India‘s competitiveness on several fronts, such as:

1. Indian Industry: Poor quality of tertiary education limits the industries‘ capabilities of access to cutting edge advances in S&T which revolutionize the production process.
2. Lack of indigenization of technology: India remains dependent on other countries in many important sectors such as defence, electronics, and high speed transportation and so on due to subpar higher education.
3. Brain Drain: It leads to loss of tax revenue, loss of potential future entrepreneurs and a shortage of skilled workers.
4. Ranking of Indian Universities: In global rankings of higher education institutes, no Indian institute figures in the list of top 200 universities. India doesn‘t attract top faculties in tertiary education due to poor standards.
5. Lack of Research in humanities.

These issues have remained due to lack of financial allocation to tertiary education, lack of autonomy to top institutes and issues with regulation and governance of universities. To tackle these issues various steps have been undertaken by the government such as:
An allocation of 10,000 crore rupees over 5 years to develop 10 public and 10 private world class institutes.

1. Reforming the regulatory system and provide more autonomy to colleges to give impetus to the growth of higher education.
2. National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF): Outlines a methodology to rank institutions of higher education in India and create competitiveness among them.
3. Rashtriya Uchchatar Shiksha Abhiyan (RUSA): Centrally Sponsored Scheme providing financial support to State Higher Educational Institutions to improve infrastructure and to promote research and innovation.
4. SWAYAM portal provides free online courses for higher learning; SWAYAM PRABHA, a group of DTH channels telecasts high quality educational programmes.
5. Impacting Research Innovation & Technology (IMPRINT): a Pan-IIT and IISc joint initiative to develop a roadmap for research to solve major engineering and technological challenges.
6. Global Initiative of Academic Networks (GIAN) aims to tap the talent pool of scientists and entrepreneurs, internationally to encourage their engagement with Indian institutes of higher education.
7. National Digital Library, campus connect programme, Uchhatar Avishkar Abhiyan, Unnat Bharat Abhiyan are being implemented to improve the quality of higher education in the country.                                                                                                                                            
8.  Reforms in UGC for promoting greater administrative and academic autonomy and revised framework for outcome based accreditation and credit based programme.
9. Higher Education Funding Agency is being set with a corpus of Rs 20,000 to augment research and related infrastructure.

India needs a determined drive to upgrade the quality of tertiary education across the board which requires that primary and secondary education must also be reformed.