Engineering education is expanding but quality engineers aren’t being produced by them. The quality of education dished out can be judged from the scenario that the percentage of ready-to-deploy engineers for IT jobs is dismally low at 2.68 per cent of the among five lakh engineers passing out every year in the country.
In fact, among these five lakh engineers only 17.45 per cent are employable for the IT services sector, while a dismal 3.51 per cent are appropriately trained to be directly deployed on projects. Only 2.68 per cent are employable in IT product companies, which require greater understanding of computer science and algorithms, according to the National Employability Report of Engineering Graduates done by Aspiring Minds.
The report is based on the data of more than 55,000 engineers who graduated in 2011. The report goes deeper to identify patterns in employability across different regions and kinds of colleges, analyzing in detail the distribution of employability.
The baffling situation is more relevant to Andhra Pradesh that has the largest number of engineering colleges in the country. The unbridled growth of colleges without concentrating on quality and employability has done more harm to the students while the managements made tons of money cashing in on the craze. In fact, the report submitted by the three-member committee of the Government has also revealed the same.
The National Employability Report too says concentrating on increasing quantity has impacted quality drastically. It was found that employability decreases logarithmically with the number of colleges in the state. It means opening more colleges is directly impacting the percentage of employable engineers graduating every year. “The need of the hour is to focus on not opening more colleges, but improving the quality in existing institutions,” says the report.
Former Technical Education Commissioner, K. Laxminarayana, who headed the three-member committee of the State Government agrees and says engineering education will be at loss if drastic steps are not taken. A senior official of the Government says focus of the Government has been hijacked by the colleges in the last few years to pay their fee arrears rather than concentrating on quality.
The quality varies drastically with only a few colleges figuring at the top of the quality ladder. With regard to employability distribution among campuses, the survey found that the quality of education falls steeply among the top-ranked colleges, implying that even colleges ranked very closely have very different quality of education. A largenumber of colleges are at exceptionally low employability. The bottom 45 percentile campuses have less than 1 in 100 candidates employable in an IT product company, while the bottom 20 percentile campuses have none.
The situation is more apt to the State where majority colleges don’t posses the academic and administrative infrastructure and also make no efforts to improve it. Companies don’t even step into more than 70 per cent of colleges for campus recruitments realising that lack of potential candidates there. Top companies visit only the top 50 colleges while the smaller companies recruit from the top 100 colleges. The rest have just no takers.
