Despite the persistently huge demand for engineering degree education in the southern state of Tamil Nadu (pop. 62 million), most of the state’s 431 private (of a total of 456) engineering colleges are finding it hard to fill their seats. This paradox of the great majority of private engineering colleges in the state scrambling to fill capacity has been manifesting year after year. In the academic year 2009-2010, over 50,000 of the 165,980 B.E/B.Tech seats available in 431 self-financing engineering colleges under the government and management quota remained vacant after admissions were completed. Very few private engineering colleges in the state are able to attract students to the extent of their total sanctioned student strength — a clear indication of their reputation for dispensing poor quality education.
Regretably, instead of availing the hard option of raising teaching-learning standards, the managements of private colleges have persuaded the state government to dilute eligibility norms for admission. Bowing to pressure, the ruling DMK government in Tamil Nadu has lowered the eligibility marks for admission into B.E/B.Tech programmes in the academic year 2010-11. Starting this year (August), for open category students, the new cut-off mark will be 50 percent as against the previous 55 percent; for backward classes 45 percent (50 percent); most backward classes 40 percent (45 percent) and scheduled castes/tribes a mere 35 percent.
Moreover, to draw students into private professional education colleges, on April 22 the state government announced a tuition fee waiver for all first generation entrants into profes-sional study programmes including medicine, engineering, law, etc of universities, government, aided and self-financing colleges, regardless of caste or economic criteria. Private self-financing colleges admitting first generation entrants have been directed to collect the tuition fees of eligible beneficiaries from the appropriate directorates of education and government departments.
However knowledgeable educationists are skeptical about such desperate attempts to fill continuously increasing capacity in privately-promoted engineering colleges. “The root cause of the problem is the total lack of control by the state government and regulatory bodies over the promotion of new engineering colleges,” says Dr. M.S. Ananth, director of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Yet even if the state government is inclined to be too liberal, the final authority for giving the operational green light to new engineering colleges countrywide is the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) — the apex regulatory body authorised to investigate and license all technical education institutions. Unfortunately AICTE has been recklessly licensing private engineering colleges in Tamil Nadu for over a decade to the extent that their number has risen from 237 in 2005-06 to 456 in 2009-10. According to the working group for technical education of the National Knowledge Commission, AICTE lacks autonomy (from the Central government represented by the Union ministry of human resource development and state governments) and tends to buckle under pressure from politically connected educationists.
And if influential self-styled educationists continue to merrily promote hastily cobbled together engineering colleges despite few takers, it’s because they become entitled to benefits such as land at concessionary prices or low-rent leases and tax exemp-tions. Most new engineering colleges are staffed with inexperienced and temporary faculty, and lack research and development facilities. Conse-quently when well-informed students and parents given them wide berth and they experience huge vacancies, their promoters exert political influence to lower admission eligibility norms.
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“Lowering the bar for admission will exacerbate the peculiarly Indian phenomenon of unemployed engineers. Yet the huge numbers of vacant seats in private engineering colleges are evidence that market forces are at play and students are making informed choices. Ultimately, it will be the survival of the fittest and many of these colleges will be forced to down shutters,” says Vaidya Nathan, founder-director of Classle Knowledge Pvt. Ltd, Chennai and former global innovation leader of Cognizant Technology Solutions, Chennai.
Meanwhile Tamil Nadu could lose the good reputation it has established for providing high quality technical education. But that seems the least of the concerns of the ruling DMK party, which is preoccupied with conceptualising one populist measure after the other in preparation for assembly elections next summer.
Hemalatha Raghupathi (Chennai)