Academic Mining or Educational Data Mining is multidisciplinary research area of Mathematics, Data Mining/ Machine Learning and Statistics to enable student, teacher, civil society and educational administrators in better understanding and decision making. Academic mining is still evolving and is closely associated with learning analytics which enables us to discover how students understand & choose and how teachers deliver right content in view of changing academic standards. This is derived from large repositories of data available in academic institutions, though data is non standardised and heterogeneous in nature. In this paper effort has been laid to understand academic mining, its root, the present scenario and future vision has been discussed. The work of major contributors in this field has been reviewed and compared in order to make academic mining or Education Data Mining understandable to researchers.