Although it is commonly accepted that the IITs and NITs provide the best engineering undergrad education, since they admit a mere 2-3 percent of aspirant school-leavers, the public interest is better served by ranking undergrad private engineering colleges which constitute 70 percent of all engineering institutions countrywide, writes Dilip Thakore. India’s engineering higher education institutions — especially the older six IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) — are the country’s pride and joy. The IITs whose number has grown to 23 in recent years are renowned worldwide because several dozen CEOs including Google’s Sundar Pichai are IIT graduates as are numerous start-up founders in Silicon Valley, California. Curiously, most economists and academia pundits see nothing amiss in planeloads of IIT graduates — whose education in these premier institutes of engineering and technology is heavily subsidised by taxpayers (including poor villagers) — migrating abroad. The annual exodus of IIT grads is viewed with cool equanimity by them. Their rationale is that the dollar remittances of emigres to families in India and exchanges with their counterparts in academia — even perhaps their eventual return back home — may well become a “brain gain” for India. The option of taking the hard road and devising policies and creating conducive conditions to plug this massive brain drain from the country is seldom entertained, except by your editors (see https://www.educationworld.in/educationworld-current-issue/educationworld-november-2023/). However, the IITs and the country’s 31 NITs (National Institutes of Technology) which also provide quality, highly-subsidised engineering and technology education to next best students who write the annual IIT-JEE (joint entrance exam), repeatedly topped the initial EducationWorld league table of engineering colleges/universities. But they admit a mere 2-3 percent of the 1.2 million school-leavers who write the annual IIT-JEE (joint entrance exam). Therefore in 2016, your editors decided to eliminate IITs, NITs and government-owned engineering colleges from the annual EducationWorld India Higher Education Rankings (EWIHER). The reasoning was that since these institutions are routinely top-ranked in all league tables published by government, Indian and foreign media, and they admit just a thin 2-3 percent of school-leavers aspiring for undergrad engineering education, the public interest would be better served if we ranked India’s next best private engineering colleges which admit the overwhelming majority of engineering aspirants. In this connection, it’s noteworthy that over 70 percent of India’s engineering HEIs (higher education institutions) are privately promoted. Against this backdrop, we commissioned the Bangalore-based AZ Research Partners Pvt. Ltd (estb.2010) to constitute and interview a representative database of 2,100 sample respondents comprising vice chancellors, faculty, industry leaders and senior students in colleges and universities to rate India’s most reputed private engineering institutions under nine parameters of higher education excellence. The parameters: leadership and governance; faculty welfare & development; faculty competence; curriculum & pedagogy; industry interface; research & innovation; infrastructure; placement of graduates and value for money that students derive. The parameters were given differing weightages (maximum scores attainable) with faculty competence accorded highest weight (350). Scores awarded by sample respondents under each parameter were totaled (maximum attainable: 2,300)…
