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By Rajkamal Rao
By Rajkamal Rao
Go back to Education
Indian technical education has undergone a sea change at all levels - from small rural colleges to elite national institutions such as the IITs. Some changes are going on even now, resulting in massive confusion for students and parents as they prepare for the competitive post 12th grade board (or equivalent) exams.
One good outcome of these reforms has been that there is an explosion of colleges offering technical education at the Bachelors and Masters levels. Today, an average student in India who aspires to earn a Bachelors of Engineering degree can get into a college even if this means that he has to pay a "donation" to get in.
The flip side of this massive expansion is that the quality of students has dropped. Employers complain that many graduating students are not ready to begin employment and have to be trained by them (the employers) to bring them up to speed. A highly provocative open letter in the New York Times by Mohit Chandra, a partner with KPMG in India, summarizes this view.
The Indian government has gone out of its way to welcome NRI/OCI children with open arms. While some institutions may offer preferential treatment to NRI children (special quotas and the like), all of them - even the elite IITs - do not discriminate against returning Indian children. The choices are many - we will discuss these in turn.
Choices for returning Indian children
All engineering and technical colleges in India have to be affiliated with two different governing bodies - the national AICTE and a regional university.
AICTE Accreditation. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), whose role was formalized by an Act of Parliament in 1987, is responsible for the planning and co-ordinated development of technical education in India.
Regional Affiliation. Engineering colleges should also be affiliated at the regional level with a university in each state. In the State of Karnataka, for example, there are 189 engineering colleges affiliated with the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) and additional colleges are expected to win affiliation in 2013. VTU is responsible to set coursework, conduct examinations and evaluate performance for the nearly 671,000 engineering students under its wing. Colleges may be affiliated on a Temporary, Permanent or Autonomous basis. A college that has just entered the VTU family will be granted temporary status until it can win Permanent status through sustained performance. Each college is required to prove annually that it is worthy of the status that it has been granted. These annual evaluations are conducted by VTU staff through programmed audits.
Colleges such as MVJCE, Acharya Institute of Technology and Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering in Bangalore are all permanently affiliated with VTU.
Colleges such as RV College of Engineering and MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology have elevated Autonomous status. While these are still under the purview of the larger VTU program, they have earned distinction over decades of providing technical education to the masses.
In general, getting into these colleges requires one to pass a 12th board exam (State, CBSE, ICSE) and a state-sponsored Common Entrance Test (CET). The formula for awarding seats is generally the same - the performance on the board exam is averaged with scores on the CET to determine merit. CBSE and ICSE syllabi, deemed more difficult than state boards, are weighted more heavily in the formula. A student wishing to study in multiple states has to sit for CET exams in each state.
Private Universities. Next up are the private deemed universities such as Jain University which are, for all practical purposes, universities themselves. These have to be approved by the central University Grants Commission (UGC); technical courses must still be affiliated with AICTE. Much like a university in the US, private universities have broad authority to set their own curricula and manage their own affairs.
Elite National Institutes. At the elite extreme are the 16 IITs, the IIIT (Indian Institute of Information Technology) and the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), formerly known as the Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs). Several changes were pushed through in 2012 and many were protested vehemently by the institutes themselves:
Direct Admissions for Students Abroad to the National Institutes of Technology (DASANIT). The Government of India has set aside 2,180 engineering seats for the 2013-14 academic year across 36 reputed institutions - select NITs, IIITs and other institutions of merit such as the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal - to NRI/OCI children.
Admission requirements appear to be less stringent than those for local children: a 6.75 GPA (out of 10) in Grade 12 (qualifying exam) and a SAT score of 1,440 in Math, Physics and Chemistry. Once a student is accepted, tuition fees (about $7,000 a year) are payable in foreign currency.
For more information, click here.
Indian technical education has undergone a sea change at all levels - from small rural colleges to elite national institutions such as the IITs. Some changes are going on even now, resulting in massive confusion for students and parents as they prepare for the competitive post 12th grade board (or equivalent) exams.
One good outcome of these reforms has been that there is an explosion of colleges offering technical education at the Bachelors and Masters levels. Today, an average student in India who aspires to earn a Bachelors of Engineering degree can get into a college even if this means that he has to pay a "donation" to get in.
The flip side of this massive expansion is that the quality of students has dropped. Employers complain that many graduating students are not ready to begin employment and have to be trained by them (the employers) to bring them up to speed. A highly provocative open letter in the New York Times by Mohit Chandra, a partner with KPMG in India, summarizes this view.
The Indian government has gone out of its way to welcome NRI/OCI children with open arms. While some institutions may offer preferential treatment to NRI children (special quotas and the like), all of them - even the elite IITs - do not discriminate against returning Indian children. The choices are many - we will discuss these in turn.
Choices for returning Indian children
All engineering and technical colleges in India have to be affiliated with two different governing bodies - the national AICTE and a regional university.
AICTE Accreditation. The All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), whose role was formalized by an Act of Parliament in 1987, is responsible for the planning and co-ordinated development of technical education in India.
Regional Affiliation. Engineering colleges should also be affiliated at the regional level with a university in each state. In the State of Karnataka, for example, there are 189 engineering colleges affiliated with the Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU) and additional colleges are expected to win affiliation in 2013. VTU is responsible to set coursework, conduct examinations and evaluate performance for the nearly 671,000 engineering students under its wing. Colleges may be affiliated on a Temporary, Permanent or Autonomous basis. A college that has just entered the VTU family will be granted temporary status until it can win Permanent status through sustained performance. Each college is required to prove annually that it is worthy of the status that it has been granted. These annual evaluations are conducted by VTU staff through programmed audits.
Colleges such as MVJCE, Acharya Institute of Technology and Dayanand Sagar College of Engineering in Bangalore are all permanently affiliated with VTU.
Colleges such as RV College of Engineering and MS Ramaiah Institute of Technology have elevated Autonomous status. While these are still under the purview of the larger VTU program, they have earned distinction over decades of providing technical education to the masses.
In general, getting into these colleges requires one to pass a 12th board exam (State, CBSE, ICSE) and a state-sponsored Common Entrance Test (CET). The formula for awarding seats is generally the same - the performance on the board exam is averaged with scores on the CET to determine merit. CBSE and ICSE syllabi, deemed more difficult than state boards, are weighted more heavily in the formula. A student wishing to study in multiple states has to sit for CET exams in each state.
Private Universities. Next up are the private deemed universities such as Jain University which are, for all practical purposes, universities themselves. These have to be approved by the central University Grants Commission (UGC); technical courses must still be affiliated with AICTE. Much like a university in the US, private universities have broad authority to set their own curricula and manage their own affairs.
Elite National Institutes. At the elite extreme are the 16 IITs, the IIIT (Indian Institute of Information Technology) and the National Institutes of Technology (NIT), formerly known as the Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs). Several changes were pushed through in 2012 and many were protested vehemently by the institutes themselves:
- Unlike in previous years, starting the 2013 academic year, entrance to the elite institutes will be determined solely on the performance on two entrance exams - the Joint Engineering Entrance (JEE) Main and the JEE Advanced. In other words, performance at the 12th grade level on the boards is no longer a criterion for admission, although students must be in the top 20% of their boards.
- The JEE Main is an online test that will be conducted by CBSE. The top 150,00 students in this test will be invited to attend the JEE Advanced, an offline test, to be held about two months later. Reservation quotas apply. The number of seats reserved for students in the general category is limited to 75,750 students. We are assuming that this category applies most to returning NRI/OCI children. Selection is therefore obviously very selective (only about 2% get in).
- Unlike in previous years, the NITs, the Indian School of Mines and the Indian Institute of Space and Technology will also participate in the dual JEE program. [These institutes previously had their own entrance exams].
Direct Admissions for Students Abroad to the National Institutes of Technology (DASANIT). The Government of India has set aside 2,180 engineering seats for the 2013-14 academic year across 36 reputed institutions - select NITs, IIITs and other institutions of merit such as the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal - to NRI/OCI children.
Admission requirements appear to be less stringent than those for local children: a 6.75 GPA (out of 10) in Grade 12 (qualifying exam) and a SAT score of 1,440 in Math, Physics and Chemistry. Once a student is accepted, tuition fees (about $7,000 a year) are payable in foreign currency.
For more information, click here.
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