AICTE report on 50 per cent vacancies in engineering colleges shows why we need job-ready courses

Who would have imagined that engineering, the most sought after discipline in India, would lose traction? Or so it seems going by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) report, which says that almost 50 per cent of the available seats in engineering colleges across States are going abegging. This at a time when there has been a spike in overall enrolment in higher education. The crisis is so acute that AICTE has decided not to accept applications for new colleges for two years for the time being. It is not that students aren’t making past the entrance tests, usually considered to be on the tougher side of the scale. The vacancies point to a deeper malaise, that of an inequity in standards of excellence. There is a yawning gap prevailing between the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and general engineering colleges in terms of the quality of instruction imparted and the employability the differing courses guarantee. Even among IITs, there is a difference between the cream centres of excellence and the branch units. As a majority of the other degree courses are not job-linked or designed according to marketability in today’s changed circumstances, and are mostly in the nature of elevating the student on the academic stakes, they have simply lost economic value. And most students, who look at jobs as a return on the investment in education — considering course fees of engineering degrees are expensive — signing up is not worth it. Besides, the massive job cuts of IT professionals and recent trends of even IITians diversifying into financial markets and consulting have been a dampener for aspirants. There can be no denying, therefore, that the BTech/BE degrees have lost sheen over the years. Just a decade ago, when the IT industry was booming and when Indian engineers figured among the most powerful CEOs in the world, the number of aspirants wanting to take the engineering course outpaced the number of seats available in colleges. The education sector was forced to add tens and thousands of seats to professional colleges, which also led to the mushrooming of anonymous colleges in practically every street corner, offering devalued degrees. We may be producing more engineers than the US and China put together but without industry applicability of courses, our engineers lack competencies and do not count among best-in-class software workers from across the world. Except for the IITs and a few NITs, most private engineering colleges have failed to make their students job-ready for lack of an updated curriculum or ignoring the poor student-faculty ratio. Some of these institutions even struggle to place their students. This is the reason why freshly-minted engineers from premier engineering colleges like IITs are still in demand even as others have to wait for years together to get a job.

According to the AICTE data, in 2019, merely six lakh graduates found jobs during campus placements. Between 2015 and 2019, a total of 518 engineering colleges shut down. While the AICTE revises its model curriculum every five years, most colleges prepare their own syllabus while others continue with decades-old programmes. The existing capacity of traditional subjects such as mechanical, chemical, electrical and civil must be expanded and made competitive. With the challenge of automation such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), blockchain technology, data science, Internet of Things and cybersecurity among others looming large, we need to redraw the template. And now.