To compile the EW India Private Engineering Colleges Rankings 2020-21, 150 field representatives of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd interviewed 1,063 faculty, 1,368 final year engineering students and 423 industry representatives countrywide – Summiya Yasmeen Engineering education in India is facing an unprecedented over-supply and graduate unemployability crisis. During the past five years, enrolments in the country’s 3,415 engineering institutions have nose-dived. In 2019, 50 percent of capacity in BE/B.Tech/M. Tech degree programmes countrywide was unutilised, and a mere 600,000 of the 1.5 million engineering students who graduated last year were campus recruited. Following this sharpest five-year fall in enrolments and 60 percent graduate unemployability, last year the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) — the apex regulatory body for technical education — constituted a special committee under the leadership of Dr. B.V.R. Reddy, chairman of IIT-Hyderabad, to suggest ways and means to reform and revive engineering education in India. Identifying “low enrolment, lower placements and low employability” as the causes of this malaise, the Reddy Committee recommends that AICTE should not licence any new engineering colleges until 2022 and encourage ene gineering colleges to diversify from traditional disciplines such as electrical, mechanical, civil engineering to provide study programmes in new technologies such as artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum computing, data sciences etc. Moreover, it called for eliminating faculty shortages and promoting greater academia-industry cooperation. Accepting the committee’s recommendations to freeze capacity with alacrity, in early February AICTE banned promotion of greenfield engineering colleges for two years. Against this gloomy backdrop, EducationWorld presents its EducationWorld India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings 2020-21 to enable higher secondary school leavers with engineering on their minds to pick and choose the most aptitudinally suitable private colleges for undergrad education. Since 2016, EducationWorld has been excluding the heavily subsidised and routinely top-ranked Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), preferring to evaluate and rank the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges to enable the 98 percent of students who don’t make it into the top 2 percent of the 1.14 million school-leavers who write the IIT/NIT Joint Entrance Exam annually, to choose the most suitable among private institutions, some of which are rapidly closing the IITs/NITs versus the rest gap. To compile the EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings (EWIPEIR) 2020-21, 150 field representatives of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000), the country’s premier market research and opinion polls company (which also conducts the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb.2007) and EW India Preschool Rankings (2010)), interviewed 1,063 faculty, 1,368 final year engineering students and 423 industry representatives countrywide. These sample respondents were persuaded to rate engineering institutes (of whom they had sufficient knowledge) on nine parameters of excellence, viz, faculty competence, placement, research and innovation, curriculum and pedagogy, industry interface, value for money, infrastructure, faculty welfare, leadership and governance. The scores awarded by respondents under each parameter were totaled to rank the country’s Top 100 private engineering colleges/institutes inter se.…
