Engineering colleges which started mushrooming in 1990s and beyond came up with effort and investments from private individuals and business groups as per the rules and guidelines of the UGC that could take students interested in various engineering courses and one of them with great importance namely Computer Science to fill up the demand created by new market for the software engineering in global markets.

Merely working to fill up a gap/demand without looking into the requirements of the industry/markets brought about the biggest menace in our country with which it has to deal now and more so in near future as majority of these are not able to provide quality education to provide industry/market ready workforce.

There is great need of technical institutions which deliver quality education for markets and this opportunity has seen a number of engineering colleges being established to meet the demands of the engineering industry markets with suitably skilled, qualified engineers who are industry ready. In order to achieve the daunting task, permissions from UGC have been granted to a number of institutes for the same but poor quality of education has hurt the industry along with lack of good quality faculty being one of the results. There is no proper auditing mechanism in place thus we see that a very limited number of Indian universities & engineering colleges are well known and ranked globally.

A deep scrutiny of these Engineering Colleges notably based out of UP, Haryana, Karnataka and other parts of India shows the condition of such engineering colleges. If we look at UP , there are roughly 300 colleges out of which only about 5% are able to even fill the total number of seats made available to engineering students, such is the sorry state of affairs.

After discussing with various people who were associated with private engineering colleges across UP, Rajasthan, Delhi/NCR and few other states, we get feeling what these Engineering colleges are teaching for Computer Science is not practically very relevant except a few who are working diligently along with companies/industries in the computer science field to build up market ready manpower and deliverables.

A computer science student should get practical exposure to the core subjects of Computer Science, be able to code debug and effectively design and analyse the real world problems .They should have choices available to choose the subject of interest/research and work towards achieving efficiency in that particular area which can be Graphics, Designing, Networking, Robotics, Cloud Computing, Software Engineering etc. The course curricula offered by the engineering college should be carefully examined so as to scan if the latest and the best technology is being taught which will assist them to be industry ready.

Most of the best engineering colleges in Delhi NCR region stress on theoretical knowledge and not on practical knowledge and application. Some universities have Credits for Soft Skills to groom the students overall and all of these are being diligently followed at some of the better known private colleges. They have employed world class faculty which have deep market/industry knowledge and experience.

While opting for an Engineering College the ward and the parents should focus on quality of education along with placements. UGC must do regular audits and advise the engineering colleges to train students in such a manner that they are able to prove their worth in the market/industry they step into after college. In addition, UGC, Industry and academicians should come together and collaborate to create one of the globally ranked universities in India.

To conclude, one should do due research and go for a good ranked engineering colleges and not the ones which are easy to get into and which just churn substandard low quality engineering crowd year after year.

In the end, remember that- “Choice you make becomes your Destiny!”