In 2021, 42 Indian institutions held UGC entitlement to offer fully online degrees. By 2026, that number has grown to over 113, offering more than 750 programs at the undergraduate and postgraduate level combined. Enrollment tells the same story: online higher education admissions grew 170% in a single year between 2021 and 2022 alone, and the trend line hasn’t reversed since.
By nearly every indicator, this has been one of the quickest structural changes to Indian higher education in recent history. Still, there is a much quieter issue underpinning this rapid expansion: most potential applicants are unable to reliably differentiate between programs that have actual entitlement to admit them and those that simply appear as though they do.
What Actually Changed in 2020
The UGC’s 2020 Open and Distance Learning and Online Programs Regulation was also somewhat novel in terms of how this is addressed in Indian higher education policies. It established an identifiable, verifiable, and annual entitlement process (via the Distance Education Bureau, or DEB), as opposed to a blanket, unconditional authorization. Thus, a university cannot just “be permitted,” but instead, must have DEB entitlement for that particular program and then renew that entitlement on a yearly basis.
This difference has huge implications and is likely the source of much of the confusion on this subject. An institution may have the right to award an online MBA but not have any entitlement whatsoever to an online BCA for example. Entitlements are granted per program not per institution, a fact which often gets lost when translating entitlement into marketing messages.
The Growth Numbers, in Context
The increase in the number of schools/colleges from 42 to 113+, or approximately 2.7 times, in just 5 years demonstrates that there has been a substantial increase in the availability of schools/colleges. Additionally, the enrollment numbers for students from India went from fewer than 26,000 to greater than 70,000, and all within one application cycle (2021-22). This data indicates that this trend is not limited to a small group of people but rather it is an established trend among a large portion of India’s workforce who are seeking to continue their educational pursuits.
MBA remains the dominant program category by enrollment, which tracks with what most EdTech platforms serving this segment already observe anecdotally: the primary buyer is a working professional seeking a credential-driven career move, not a fresh graduate exploring options.
Where the System Still Creates Friction
The entitlement-verification step, which means checking a specific program against the current DEB list at deb.ugc.ac.in, is not complicated in isolation. The friction comes from three compounding factors:
- Annual renewal means a program entitled last year isn’t automatically entitled this year, so a “verified” search from six months ago can already be stale
- Per-program granularity means checking a university’s name alone tells a prospective student almost nothing about a specific course they’re actually considering
- Marketing language rarely maps cleanly onto regulatory status since terms like “recognized,” “approved,” and “UGC-entitled” get used loosely and interchangeably in promotional material, when only the last one carries the specific legal meaning that matters
For an industry moving this quickly, the verification step hasn’t scaled at the same pace as the supply and demand growth around it, which is arguably the more interesting story than the growth numbers themselves.
What This Suggests for EdTech Platforms and Policymakers
The best way for platforms to support consumers using their services to find verified programs would be to build verification into the counseling process itself and include it with each program (on a refresh schedule matching DEB’s) instead of simply linking to the DEB Portal. Already some platforms are doing this effectively. Most still regard “UGC approved” as an immutable badge, rather than a dynamic status that one could verify.
As for policymakers, the numbers may suggest that the regulatory environment is creating enough new opportunities to create a viable business model. However, there is no evidence that consumers understand how they can verify the legitimacy of these businesses. Closing this knowledge gap will likely have greater implications for increasing public trust in the sector than any additional expansion of entitlements.
This article was contributed by the team at Phoenix Online Education, which works with UGC-entitled universities across India on online degree program counselling.
