What You Should Know About Joining an Engineering College in India

There is an incredible craze to join engineering colleges in India. This is in spite of the fact that over 1.5 million students graduate from India’s engineering colleges every year and one-third of them fail to land a job within a year or two of graduation.

There were 3,345 engineering colleges in India, according to the data made available by the Education Department as of 2015. We don’t have the latest stats for the number of engineering colleges in the country in 2017, but there have been reports that the government has shut down hundreds of colleges because of their poor educational standards.

The goal is to weed out the worst engineering colleges and to allow only those that provide a decent standard of teaching, a convivial learning environment and first-rate facilities the permission to provide engineering education in the country.

There are many Indian engineering colleges that are of a first-rate quality. The IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and NITs (National Institutes of Technology) are very good, comparable to some of the colleges in the United States and Europe.

Beyond the IITs and NITs, there are a few good engineering colleges as well. But the vast majority of engineering institutions in India are very much of a mediocre standard. This is a hard reality that cannot be denied.

Things are certainly much better in the past when options for prospective engineering students were very limited. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, there weren’t many private engineering colleges. There were only the IITs and a few other government-controlled engineering colleges. The number of seats available was very few.

It has only been relatively recently, or since the mid-1990s that private players emerged in engineering education. This period coincided with the IT boom in India, and the spectacular rise of world class Indian IT companies such as Infosys, Wipro and TCS.

Suddenly, there was a demand for hundreds of thousands of qualified engineers every year. Literally anyone with an engineering degree got placed in a decent position and were paid fancy salaries of Rs. 40,000 to 50,000/month in their early 20s – much higher than what their parents made in their 50s.

That led to the engineering boom in India and since then the demand for engineering has been extraordinary. Indian engineers are considered to be among the best in the world and are placed in top positions in some of the world’s biggest companies –such as Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft and Sundar Pichai the CEO of Alphabet.

If you want to do your engineering in India, it is very important for you to do very well in your entrance exams such as IIT-JEE, CET and so on. You should aim to be in the 99^th percentile, no matter which exam you are appearing for.

Only that can ensure that you will be able to get into your chosen engineering college and in a field that you are interested in, whether that is mechanical engineering, computer engineering or electrical engineering.