Thiruvananthapuram: The self-financing engineering colleges in the state have brought down the quality of education to its lowest depths, it seems. For, a study conducted by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII) has found that only 17 percent of engineering graduates are employable and that the others did not have adequate skills. An expert committee appointed by the Kerala High Court to study the problems of the self-financing engineering colleges in 2011 had concluded that many of them lacked quality. Some of them had a pass percentage as low as two.
It was against this background that the state government had proposed to improve technical education and impose strict norms for admission to B Tech courses in self-financing colleges, but unfortunately it has kept the plan on the backburner. The proposal was that the colleges would be given approval for admissions only if they followed strict academic standards from 2015-16.
According to the norms, they should have a minimum pass percentage of 25, 30 and 35 for the fourth, sixth and eighth semesters respectively to get approval for admissions.
Recently, the government had formed the Kerala Technological University to oversee the quality parameters of all the engineering colleges. KTU Pro-Vice-Chancellor M. Abdul Rahman told Deccan Chronicle that he was not sure of the present status of the proposal. There had not been any directive from the government on the issue, Mr Rahman said.
But Mr G.P.C. Nayar, national president of the Federation of Associations of Private Unaided Professional Colleges, said that the state government had dropped the plan. “How could such a criterion work in a democratic country,” asked Mr Nayar. Kochi-based urologist Dr N.K. Sanil Kumar, who has been following the self-financing scenario, said that the colleges with low pass percentage had a large number of vacant seats.
The students who did not have aptitude for engineering were joining the course and they eventually failed to clear the examinations, Dr Kumar said. The situation is worse going by the ‘India Skills’ report prepared by the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII). A study, ‘Liberalisation of technical education: Has a significant increase in enrolment translated into increase in supply of engineers,’ conducted by Mr Sunil Mani and Mr M. Arun for the Centre for Development Studies in 2012 said that one out of every two students, who joined the four-year degree programme in engineering, either dropped out or failed in the examinations.
One major reason for the poor quality of engineering colleges is the spurt in their number. The state which started out with nine colleges with a sanctioned intake of 2,810 has now over 157 colleges with 58,220 seats. The expert committee had recommended that the minimum marks for admission should be raised and asked the government to formulate an action plan to improve the standard of education in the engineering colleges.
It was based on this report that the division bench of the court in June 2012 directed the state government and the All-India Council for Technical Education to take steps to derecognise and close down the poor-quality self-financing engineering colleges. The court had asked all universities in the state to post the results of the engineering examinations on their websites to help the students evaluate the performance of the colleges before seeking admission. The KTU was set up to monitor all engineering colleges in the state following the court intervention.
