Misguiding Indian Engineering Colleges survey Rankings

Engineering colleges are increasing exponentially. Students planning to take admissions for engineering courses need not worry about getting a seat. Many colleges are offering the management seats just for nominal fees. Like every year many surveys are being conducted on the engineering colleges and the results are being published in the popular magazines. Every time for the surprise of people and students, unknown and unheard college names will take the lead over the well established institutions.

The survey will be done on various factors such as infrastructure of the institution, faculty with doctorate degree, research output, placements and finally the popularity depending on the ranking of the number of students taking admission to the courses. I don’t know how these surveys will evaluate research output of the colleges. One more important thing about these surveys is that it will cover only the colleges which voluntarily agree for the surveys by paying money.

Most of the times only the private engineering colleges will come forward for the surveys as it will increase the popularity of the college and also possible to get good ranking by spending some extra money. Government colleges won’t be having sufficient funds for spending on such surveys and they stay away. Ultimately the benefit for the private engineering college is even an average engineering college will get good ranking in the paid surveys and in a reverse engineering view college gets more number of admissions.

Not only these surveys increase the popularity but also allow the colleges to give a page advertisement in some of the leading magazines of the country. The transparency and reliability of such surveys will never gain importance as no one will bother about these things and the private colleges will be happy for getting wide coverage more than they deserve.

Recently was going through the survey done by on of the leading magazines in collaboration with some private sector agency. As I expected, the newly opened and least popular colleges were on the top of the list. The newly opened colleges most of the time will have no research output and poor infrastructure facilities. But according to the survey these colleges are excellent centers of engineering education.

These surveys are in a way misleading general public. Students not aware of the colleges techniques of advertising colleges will be misguided landing up in the low grade colleges. On the other hand students lacking guidance on the colleges and the courses will blindly rely on these surveys and face troubles by the extortion of the private engineering colleges. It will be appropriate if the popular magazines stop publishing these kinds of surveys ignoring the social responsibility only for the sake of money.


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