Engineering colleges which cropped up in 90s and beyond was a venture and effort by private individual’s as per the regulations of the UGC that could absorb students interested in engineering streams to fill up the insistent and peremptory demands of a newly found market. But none of them realized that they’d bring about the biggest menace in our country which it is dealing with now. A lucid scan of these Engineering Colleges especially based out of Delhi NCR region and many other parts of India shows vividly that they are educating students on the technology market and in the process filling up the gap they tend to have after being subjected to theoretical stress. After taking views from scores of people who were in some way or the other associated with different private Engineering Colleges across Delhi NCR, I came to the conclusion that whatever these Engineering colleges do they are nowhere close to high quality education except a few who are working diligently to build up world class deliverables.
Most of the Engineering Colleges in NCR region stress on theoretical questions that serve no purpose than test the memory skills of students. An Engineer should be market ready and have perfected cognitive, analytical, technical and hand-on skills. An Engineering college should be focussing on engaging students in cutting edge research projects that could help them improvise, exploit their computation , their coding and decoding , their debugging skill sets and more aggressively their communication skills. Some universities have Credits for Soft Skills and Transdisciplinary Learning (TDL) to groom the students overall. And all of these I found are being diligently followed at Sushant University Gurugram, one of the top universities in North India. They have employed world class faculty and most with Doctoral degrees and quality research works to their credit. These students get good opportunity to work with renowned Professors on research publications to present and publish them in IEEE/Elsevier/Springer/ACM and other reputed academic body of scientific publications. Such Engineering colleges collaborate with private entities to establish research labs within the campus similar to what is in the US. They employ people from the industry who could bring an outside perspective. The Engineering colleges should also try their level best to collaborate with the top universities across the world to start some kind of an exchange program like the IIT Bombay/Sushant University program which brings about globalization and benefits the students immensely. They should build an entrepreneurial ecosystem within the college which students could benefit from and which in turn leads to the creation of world class products.
Hence, while opting for Engineering the aspirant should see that if the Engineering College is following flexible state-of-art curricula, innovative courses and introduce them as elective courses to keep in par with the market to fetch the aspirant engineer employability easily.
I feel while opting for an Engineering College the ward and the parents should not compromise on Quality of Education and resources imparted for the benefit of the potential future of their wards lest they get into-a mediocre life filled with EMIs and regrets. Are they solely responsible for it—No, I think the onus to train a student lies majorly with the Engineering college and this is where the whole accountability shifts towards the Engineering college then no matter how hard bodies like UGC try to raise the standards their efforts would go all futile.
To conclude I must say one shouldn’t opt for Engineering colleges which just churn substandard low quality engineering crowd year after year but build them, and the “Choice you make becomes yours Destiny”.
