Against the backdrop of plummeting standards of engineering education, EducationWorld presents India’s Top 100 private engineering education institutions league table based on the assessments of 2,876 knowledgeable sample respondents countrywide – Summiya Yasmeen Engineering education in India is facing an unprecedented quality crisis. Surveys conducted by national and international organisations have laid bare the poor quality education dispensed by a majority of India’s 3,415 engineering colleges. According to a 2018 study conducted by the World Bank and Stanford University, the higher order thinking skills of first and third year undergraduate engineering students in India are “substantially lower” than of their Chinese and Russian counterparts. Moreover, according to a damning employability survey conducted earlier this year by Aspiring Minds, a Delhi-based job seekers evaluation and certification company, 80 percent of the country’s engineering graduates are unemployable in the knowledge economy. A major cause of the steady decline in engineering education standards is reckless licensing of private engineering colleges over past two decades by the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), the apex regulatory body for technical education. The number of private engineering colleges countrywide has almost doubled from 1,511 in 2006-07 to 3,415 in 2017-18. This over-supply has resulted in several colleges reporting a rising number of vacant seats year on year which has forced hundreds of them to compromise on quality of faculty and enabling infrastructure. Replying to a question in the Lok Sabha last April, Satya Pal S, Union minister of state for human resource development, revealed that vacancies in AICTE approved engineering colleges during the past four years averaged 45 percent. This is why EducationWorld brings to you India’s Top 100 private engineering education institutions. Against this backdrop of plummeting standards — especially among private engineering colleges which have mushroomed across the country — in 2016 EducationWorld took the initiative to publish pan-India rankings of the country’s most respected private engineering institutes, excluding the relatively well-funded and heavily subsidised Central government-promoted Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and National Institutes of Technology (NITs), which offer study programmes approved by AICTE’s National Board of Accreditation (NBA), attract high-quality faculty and provide enabling infrastructure. Routinely ranked among the Top 10 engineering colleges in all media league tables, the IITs and NITs admit a mere top 1 percent of higher secondary school-leavers who clear their rigorous common entrance exam. Therefore with the IITs and NITs leagues ahead of the rest, it made good sense for EducationWorld to assess, evaluate and rank the India’s Top 100 private engineering education institutions to enable parents and students to choose the most suitable among them. To compile the EW India Private Engineering Institutes Rankings (EWIPEIR) 2019-20, 150 representatives of the Delhi-based Centre for Forecasting and Research Pvt. Ltd (C fore, estb.2000), one of the country’s premier market research companies (which also conducts the annual EducationWorld India School Rankings (estb.2007) and EW India Preschool Rankings (2010), interviewed 1,134 faculty and 1,255 final year engineering students and 487 industry representatives across the country. These sample respondents were…
