Education sector is considered as the boon for the development of any nation. In India this sector is developing much more than any other domestic industry. The role of education (educational) institutions and teachers has changed drastically in last decade, where providing customized courses, maintaining quality standards to meet the government regulations and to retain yourself in dynamic competitive global environment is of utmost importance. The need is to act rationally and to take right decision at right time for the good of students and institution. Inspite of the huge amount of data being stored about the students, the institutions are not able to make suitable decisions. The major problems faced are the ability to discover the suitability of the students for a particular course, the ability to retain them in the course, detection of abnormal behavior of the students, grouping the students of similar skill set into one group, finding the best combination of associated courses for a student, prediction about the performance of the students in a particular course, detection of abnormal values in the result sheets. The panacea for all these ills is to extract the knowledge hidden in the data bases and to use that knowledge extracted for the decision-making process. The data mining techniques can prove to be a boon for these problems and this paper explores the use of data mining techniques as a solution for these problems to improve the efficiency of higher education institution.