Engineering Colleges : Turning into Ghost towns

The scenario of Education in the Engineering segment is finally hitting its new low. There is a comprehensive report by players like Aspiring minds about the employability of the students passing out from the tier 3 or 4 colleges that detail out statistical analysis in a very lucid format . Mind you working in competition with them with in the same space , I can definitely vouch for their data coverage.

My aim here is not to share the statistics again and again but share my experiences which I had with the various stakeholders in the domain . We were talking to one of the young directors of an institute regarding the services we offer for college students. He was very patient in hearing us out and then he came out with a suggestion that why don't we look at the school segment for our services . I asked him why is it not apt for his college students. The answer was realistic and very pragmatic from business point of view.

He said the market is down for engineering, the colleges are making losses, no one would invest any amount for any product unrelated to final placements. He estimated that it would take 5 years for B.Tech to bounce back, as many colleges would die out and market dynamics would create equilibrium . In the meantime they had decided to shift focus to B.Pharma as a recent legislation made it mandatory to link Aadhar card of the owner/pharmacist applying for the Chemist shop . So now the demand would be up for the B.Pharma candidates .

A perfect move , there is nothing wrong with this decision, business wise. I just smiled on the part : Business wise......

There are many more such experiences I have had, but it is better to spend time doing something constructive so I would instead put forth few pointers for students to follow while looking up for a college.

1) DO NOT LOOK at placement records blindly, most of the names on the list are inflated. Many times the names of the companies are still on list which might not have visited for campus recently.

Companies have many processes they hire for , many companies hire for BPO/WebChat roles and the placement brochure has the logo giving the impression that campus drive was for Development/Testing profiles.

2)In case of multiple campus colleges/ university . Always stress on the finding out the list of companies that visited the campus you are offered. If your college is in Jaipur and they are talking about placements as centralised option.. Probe more.( NOT all branches/Campuses send satellites to space...I hope you get the hint.)

3) Find out the number of teachers with PhDs , find out about paper's published recently. This is a bit tedious but most colleges do maintain a list on their websites. Many big private universities have the money to hire ex-government employees and ex HODs from premier institutes but they rarely teach. Find out about the teachers who would actually teach.

4) Find out about the labs and any special project on which the college students might be working on .

5)Find out about type of activities, seminars, competition the students have taken part in . The more academic the nature of activities the better it is. Look for newsletter or similar activities by student community. A glance through them would give very great insights on the environment of the college.

6)Spend time with threads like pagalguy.com to see if you could gather more information about your course and college. Some colleges have threads running for a long time and you can actually get a lot of information about the college from there.

Whatever I have mentioned might seem like common sense , trust me given the pressure parents & students are made to go through while counselling session the best would buckle. Hope it helps but I believe the odds are heavily stalked against the students and their parents against the glitter of Advertising campaigns some of these institutes employ.

( The suggestion is based on my experience while working in the sector).