To compile the EW India’s top 100 private engineering colleges 2021-22, market researchers of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting & Research Pvt. Ltd interviewed 1,018 engineering college faculty, 1,126 final year students and 379 industry representatives countrywide – Summiya Yasmeen It’s more than a year since all education institutions countrywide, including preschools, schools, colleges and universities were ordered to shut down by the Central government last March to check the spread of the vicious Covid pandemic, which in its second wave is raining death and misery countrywide. With campuses under lockdown, education institutions have switched to online teaching with varying degrees of success to continue the education of their students. During the past 13 months, the world’s largest child and youth population estimated at 500 million has been learning best as it can from ill-equipped homes across the country. For India’s 3,415 engineering colleges, the past year has been a mixed bag. Though the majority, because of their faculty and students’ greater degree of familiarity with digital information technologies, has made a smooth transition to virtual teaching-learning platforms, the admission, academic, exams and placement calendars of engineering colleges have been severely disrupted. The academic year which usually begins in August was postponed to October, campus placements of graduating batches of 2020 were sharply down, and most state governments cancelled exams for all intermediate semester students with examinations held only for final semester students. Yet, despite these delays and disruptions, most engineering college managements responded creatively to the pandemic challenge. Teaching-learning moved online, on Zoom, YouTube, etc. as did laboratory classes. Examinations, internships and placements also went virtual with proctored online tests and video interviews replacing physical interaction. Nevertheless, despite the Covid-19 pandemic hugely disrupting the academic calendar of higher education institutions, we have persisted with our annual exercise of rating and ranking the country’s best private engineering colleges. 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 98 percent of students who don’t make it into the top 2 percent of the 635,000 school-leavers who write the IIT/ NIT Joint Entrance Exam. Our focus is on aiding and enabling this 98 percent to choose the most suitable among private engineering colleges, some of which are rapidly closing the IITs/NITs versus the rest gap. To compile the EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings (EWIPEIR) 2021-22, market researchers of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000), our trusted partner ab initio — which also conducts our pioneer annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb.2007) and EW India Preschool Rankings (2010) — interviewed 1,018 engineering college faculty, 1,126 final year students and 379 industry representatives countrywide. These sample respondents were persuaded to rate engineering institutes (of whom they had sufficient knowledge) on nine parameters of excellence — faculty competence, placement, research and innovation, curriculum and pedagogy (digital readiness), industry interface, value for…
