AICTE May Cut 6,00,000 Engineering College Seats - Is it the right decision?

This decision was in the making for years. I am going to state the example of my state Odisha to prove my point. Back in the early 2000s engineering colleges started to come up in Odisha. Back then the IT hiring in the country was starting to pick up and anyone or everyone who passed out of colleges was picked up by companies willy-nilly. Since Odisha did not have any lucrative job opportunities, this soon became the ticket for a well paid job for all Odia teenagers. Study science in the 12th standard, give the Odisha JEE and get into any college even if you did not have any interest in engineering or actually doing things. By late 2000 any businessman who wanted to make a lot of cash easily, started his/her engineering college by pumping in cash for eye catching infrastructure and nothing else. AICTE started issuing accreditation to every other college that bloomed in the market.

In the year 2008 when I joined engineering , 23 colleges cropped up and in the following year 49 more. If you remember 2008 was the year of the recession and noticing the downward trend, Odia students delved into other streams. That’s when the colleges under the state based BPUT (Biju Patnaik University of Technology) faced the brunt. The only colleges that were actually bringing in campus selection were the autonomous deemed ones namely, Institute of Technical Education and Research and Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology. The aforementioned colleges were the only ones where students were flocking in because they were the ones with all the high campus selection figures.

From 2010 onwards, over 30000 seats in B.Tech remained vacant in Odisha engineering colleges and this put the Odisha Private Engineering College Association (OPECA) in a fix. (In my 11 year old not-so-prestigious college they had to shut down the entire AE&I branch in 2010 due to lack of admission). They (OPECA) had to protect the financial interests of its members so they asked the Odisha JEE folks to organise another JEE so that they could get a couple of more students. The colleges too went to states like Bihar, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and West Bengal to get more students. They were bringing in students in hundreds and giving them admission by flaunting fake placement records. This year over 60000 seats remained vacant, so it’s better to shut this down, at once.

Most colleges in Odisha have the following problems

Inefficient faculty – Most employ students that have just passed B.Tech and not even done their M.Tech.

No Internship opportunities – I am sad to say that none of the Engineering colleges used to assist students. The only job exposure they got was through paid training session at companies.

Fake Placement – Yes, that placement in fake companies and not just spoofing placement records, I can attest to that I was a victim of that scam. Most of my friends who got a job was going to hubs like Bangalore, Hyderabad and Gurgaon with fake experience certificates or referrals.

Rampant cheating – In most colleges at time of admission they say that, “Degree is not a problem sir, we will help your child pass the exams”. Sadly that’s actually true and this results in subpar engineers by the hundreds.

Too many students – The colleges take in a lot of students, even though they are not able to give them appropriate training or tools or placement.

I am glad that AICTE took this step. This will help at least the folks in Odisha realise that there are a lot of other sectors that just engineering.

Back in 2008 I got admission as a foundation batch of my college which has become a guilt & nightmare of my life if you won't believe.
After taking admission i realized that i took admission far below my merit marks and had i waited for at least 1 month i would have got admission in some reputed college and thus the chain of bad events started.
There were random teaching staffs upto last year, no proper guidance, affiliated University was pathetic. People use to take admission based on infrastructure even if adviced against.
Even they showed fake placement records. The students got placed actually but not through college. They used to call pass out students and ask info all that.
Barely a company visited my college afaik.
I would say that no matter what school you studied if you take admission in a good college you can prosper in many ways.
Even if this steps doesn't produce quality engineers at least people like me wont get admission to such random college by online counsel system.

#-Link-Snipped-# #-Link-Snipped-#
Those are some really serious issues you have raised there! My concern is that the mindset of most students these days is that - "I want to go for Engineering as there is a job guarantee (= more chances of getting a job than if you do B.Sc. or B.A.)"
OR "Atleast I can call myself a B.E. or B.Tech engineer."

Now if they reduce the number of seats (that are currently only going vacant), will it result in students and parents revolting that they aren't getting admission (equal opportunity) of getting a degree in engineering? <-- This thought scares me!

Also, the question remains - How can the existing system be improved? After reducing 6 lakh engineering college seats, what about the ones that are left? Will they get well qualified teachers? Who will ensure that more than 3,500 colleges have a faculty (who is worth calling a faculty) for every subject in the curriculum? How can we dream about innovation, if 'engineering' students of the country do not even have proper guidance?

PS: I also heard someone on the internet raising questions about modifying the syllabus of engineering curriculum. Well, that's a whole another big problem that needs to be tackled.

But what are the colleges will come under this? I see this is another huge opportunity of corruption save college seat by buying auditing official one time.
If you have the massive students, you have to give opportunity of education. Another ways is to create job in other field and better education infrastructure.

Instead cutting the seats, they should force colleges for better Labs and quality education.

• 3rd party auditing every year
• Minimum placement criteria
• One syllabus for all state engineering colleges and exam

Have created a poll.

I recently gave a work shop on selenium in one of the engineering college in our home town.
Sadly, the interest level and intellectual level of students is very very less compared to what i thought it would be or compared to my time when i was in engineering.

Students are habituated to spoon feed, and when i tried a different mechanism to create interest and make them do something new on their own only 1 out of 200 was able to do that.
Thats the sad state of students i have interacted with.

Engineering is for a degree sake , its for marriage for few people. Its to go to US for higher studies(no study go there work earn money face certificate job and struggle)
Its for timepassing.
For very less percentage its their passion.

Interesting point is- I asked a question,why they have joined CSIT, everyone answered its their passion.
Then i asked very simple questions about java and eclipse. No one answered. I think now-a-days it became a prestige issue if i dont answer I am doing this out of my interest where people dont really know what interest is.

Ankita KatdarePS: I also heard someone on the internet raising questions about modifying the syllabus of engineering curriculum. Well, that's a whole another big problem that needs to be tackled.

Yes, I agree with #-Link-Snipped-# on this issue. Uniform syllabus that is updated now and then is needed.

Example time –

Remember the two deemed universities I quoted in the previous message on the thread (Institute of Technical Education and Research and Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology). They have 5 subjects per semester and BPUT has 6 subjects per semester. During its inception in 2004, BPUT aped the syllabus of IITs and has stuck to that syllabus till now. I met an IITian in college once, who glanced at the syllabus and said that some of the things they were teaching us were completely unnecessary for an IT or Computer Science graduate. While other universities modify the syllabus according to changing needs of students, BPUT rotten system puts additional burden on students. A Uniform syllabus that is updated and suited to needs of training students is necessary.

#-Link-Snipped-# From reading your experience, I can assure you that the situation is the same across every city and state in India. In my city too, whenever they bring a guest lecturer or a senior faculty to talk about advanced technologies or latest trends in the industry, they would be met with utter disappointment.
On this one time, one senior faculty closed his presentation slides from the projector midway, stopped what he was sharing and said, "You know what, let's start with the basics, right from the A-B-C, because I see that none of you has any idea what I am talking about and none of you knows what this is all about." He later told our department lecturers that this was a huge waste of time for him and requested them not to invite him again to the college ever again.

The thing that most disappointed him was the lack of enthusiasm to learn.

#-Link-Snipped-# I agree with you. Nagpur University is no different. They teach programming language like COBOL (which is great), but have no trace of JAVA in the entire curriculum. They recently introduced Dot Net I heard, but there's no single faculty in 10s of colleges who has ever written a serious code from start to finish on their own. Every time a curious student raised a question, they'd have no answers.

The suggestions put forth by Anoop above seem right to me -

Anoop Kumar

• 3rd party auditing every year

• Minimum placement criteria

• One syllabus for all state engineering colleges and exam

I am just not sure how they Government can implement (enforce) this. The expanse is big and it seems the HRD minister's attention needs to be immediately brought to this issue.