India's most admired professional colleges

To enable higher secondary school students and graduates to make informed choices about institutes offering new- age professional education, EducationWorld commissioned the Delhi-based market research agency C fore to rate and rank India’s best professional colleges through a perceptual survey. Summiya Yasmeen reports

Until the onset of the noughties a decade ago, professional education was synonymous with medical, engineering, business management and law. But the historic liberalisation and deregulation of Indian industry in 1991, liberated the mindset of middle class India. As a result there’s growing awareness within the haute and petit bourgeoisie countrywide that a slew of new vocations and well-paid career options with exciting prospects in hotel management, animation design, law, mass communication, and fashion design have become available for middle class youth.

“There’s a paradigm shift to these new-age careers which not only offer economic prosperity but also enjoy societal respectability. Two decades ago, role models in new careers were few and far between, but now there’s no dearth of them reassuring parents/students of bright future prospects. Simultaneously there’s been an exponential growth in the number of private institutions offering contem-porary professional education while expanding capacity and study options. All this has contributed towards making non-conventional job streams more attractive,” says Viral Doshi, an alumnus of Cornell University, USA, and founder-director of Viral Doshi Associates, a Mumbai-based career gui-dance firm offering counseling and psychometric testing services to students and schools.

This explosion of radically new career options has been prompted in part by mushr-ooming  private professional education institutions countrywide, offering degree and diploma programmes in fashion design, hospitality manage-ment, air-hostessing and even bar-tending. But while some of these colleges and institutes have excellent infrastructure and curriculums, not a few are run by parvenu education entrepr-eneurs whose advertising is in inverse proportion to the quality of education delivered in their classrooms by ill-trained faculty.

Therefore to enable higher secondary school-leavers to make informed choices about non-medical/engineering profes-sional education, EducationWorld commissioned the well-known Delhi-based market research agency Centre for Forecasting and Research (C fore, estb. 2000) to rate and rank India’s top professional colleges through a percep-tual survey. Based on popularity and employment opportunities, C fore zeroed in on five fields of professional education — law, hotel management, fashion design, animation and mass communication — to gauge the public reputation of institutions dispensing alternative professional education, and assess and evaluate the best among them.

“To rate and rank india’s best law colleges, hotel management, anim-ation, fashion design and mass communication institutes, 1,513 industry professionals, 815 faculty members and 726 students from over 500 professional education institutes were adminis-tered a structured questionnaire and asked to rate institutes they were familiar with on a ten point scale across four broad parameters — competence of faculty, pedagogic systems and processes, placements, and infrast-ructure and support systems. They were also asked to allot weightage to each parameter in terms of relative importance. To eliminate bias, the rating respondents gave to the institutes they were employed with and/or had graduated from, was not considered. The average rating each institute received against the four parameters was calculated and multiplied by the corresponding aggregate weightage. The sum total of the weighted parameter scores were aggregated and institutes were ranked accordingly,” explains Premchand Palety, the promoter-chief executive of C fore which conducts market research surveys and opinion polls for Hindustan Times and CNBC TV 18 among other publications, as also for various political parties.

With several professional education institutions — government and private — still in their infancy, the league tables have been limited to the Top 20 and in some cases Top 15 and Top 10. In the pages following, we present the all-India league tables of Top 20 hotel management institutes, law colleges, and fashion design institutions; Top 15 mass communication instit-utes and Top 10 animation institutes.