With almost 90 percent of the 3,415 engineering colleges countrywide promoted and managed by private edupreneurs, it makes eminent good sense to separate the sheep from goats among India’s private engineering institutes, to enable parents and students to assess and evaluate them inter se – Summiya Yasmeen ADDRESSING A PRESS conference in New Delhi on April 8, Anil Sahasrabudhe, chairman of the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex regulatory body for technical education, revealed that student enrolment in the country’s 3,415 engineering institutions has been falling during the past two years. In 2015-16, the total undergraduate intake capacity was 1.6 million, against which aggregate enrolment was 860,357. In 2016-17, against the intake capacity of 1.5 million, enrolment was 787,127. “This year too the gap will be 80,000 seats. Around 200 colleges have applied for closure as they’ve been experiencing very low admissions in the recent past,” said Sahasrabudhe, who added that 50 engineering colleges closed down in 2016-17. According to industry experts, a major cause of declining student enrolments is that a huge number of licenced engineering colleges are certifying unemployable graduates. The National Employability Report 2016 of Aspiring Minds Assessment Pvt. Ltd — a Delhi-based employability evaluation and certification company — indicates that 80 percent of engineers certified by engineering and technology colleges every year are unemployable. Most of these under-trained engineers end up in low-end jobs in non-engineering fields, or are unemployed. With the passage of time, it is becoming increasingly clear that the prime cause of the rising tide of unemployed engineering graduates is huge variation in the quality of education being dispensed by a large number of engineering colleges which have been recklessly licenced by AICTE over the past decade. Their number has almost doubled from 1,511 in 2006-07 to 3,415 in 2016-17. Now confronted with a huge quality crisis in engineering education, AICTE has announced that by 2022, at least 50 percent of all study programmes offered by technical education institutions across the country will have to be accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA). “Just 15 percent of engineering programmes offered in the country are accredited by NBA. AICTE, as part of its various quality initiatives, has decided that by 2022, the majority of courses will have to be accredited by NBA,” says Sahasrabudhe. Against this backdrop of plunging standards of engineering education — especially among unsupervised private colleges which have mushroomed across the country — in 2013 EducationWorld took the lead to publish pan-India rankings of the country’s most respected engineering colleges, excluding the heavily-subsidised and well-funded Central government-promoted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), which offer NBA-accredited programmes, attract high-quality faculty and provide enabling infrastructure. Leagues ahead of other engineering colleges, they monotonously top all media league tables and attract the top 1 percent of school-leavers who clear their super-tough open entrance exams. Therefore, with almost 90 percent of the 3,415 engineering colleges promoted and managed by private entrepreneurs, it made eminent good…
