How to Chose An Engineering College

Since I write about IITs and JEE Counseling on my website as well as my blog, a lot of people assume that I would have opinions on engineering colleges as well. Since I get so many emails, I once decided to write about how all of you could yourself decide which institute would provide quality education to you. I try to update this document once a year, but there is not much in this document which gets dated.

I cannot claim to have known a lot of colleges. I travel a lot, and must have visited more than 100 colleges all across country during my career so far, talked to thousands of students, and I can claim to have some understanding of the higher technical education in the country. However, all these visits and browsing the website cannot really tell you everything about any particular college. So I am going to do two things here.

One, I have prepared a small list of colleges, who have made a significant positive impression on me. This may be due to my visits to that college, or my interactions with faculty or students there, or sometimes just visiting the website of that college. So, if a particular college is not listed, it is most likely because I don't know enough about them, and not because I don't consider them as a good college. Also, please note that I do not claim to know anything about programs other than Computer Science. When I visit a college, it is usually only the CS (or related) department. And, if I visit their website, it is usually the CS department website. So, when I recommend a college, I am really recommending it for CS and related areas only.

Here is the list of Recommended Colleges (for CS/IT only)

Two, I am writing below how one should go about ranking them oneself. If I had infinite time, I would have followed this approach myself to rank these colleges. In my opinion, the ranking should depend on the factors that I list below. You should check whether the department has a website or not. If the department does not have a website, or does not provide all the information on the website, then don't rank it very high. The assumption here is that in today's age, if a department in CS/IT area does not provide information for potential students, then it can only be because they don't have any meaningful information to provide. Besides, a lot of information that I ask you to check is mandatory information as per AICTE guidelines.

If you go through the following details, you are bound to find it a very time consuming process. (You will be right, and that is exactly the reason I am giving the process, and not doing the exercise myself.) But choosing a college will have a huge impact on your future, and you should be willing to spend a lot of time in doing this exercise. Of course, you always have an option of looking at the last year's closing ranks in all the exams like AIEEE and use that as the basis of making your choices. But then you didn't need to read even this much.

Before I talk about what are the important criteria for selecting college, let me add that the eventual goal is to do well in career, and be happy in life. Success in career depends on a lot of factor: your passion and interest in the area you are working in, your preparedness (this is where education comes in), your ability to keep learning lifelong (this is why good faculty is absolutely important - to not just teach you some technical stuff, but tell you how to learn yourself), your network of friends (this is where brand name of college will help), and a huge amount of luck.

In today's society, almost all students and parents take the value of the first paycheck as the only measure of success. So, if you visit the forums where students discuss which college to join, the most important questions are: how is the placement, how many companie came, what was the highest salary offered, and so on. People don't want to know whether students of that college are going for higher studies, to just give an example.

Even if money is important to you, shouldn't the career earnings be more important that the first paycheck. The career earnings will depend on a whole lot of factors, but two factors will depend on the institute that you select. One, how good is your understanding of the discipline. Not just how good you are as a programmer, but do you have a feel for data structures and algorithms. Do you think algorithmically. Do you understand the functioning of operating systems, compilers, database management systems, etc. (I am giving examples from Computer Science, since I am more familiar with this part of IT.) The second factor is whether you are excited about learning all the new stuff that you will come across during your career.

A whole lot of colleges will prepare you for the first job. They will teach you less basics but more of technology. They will focus on preparing you for the interview for the first job, including teaching you how to dress up for the occasion. They will also have a suave placement incharge who can charm all companies to come to campus for placement interviews. He will also be smart enough to give out doctored placement statistics to lure fresh students to his/her institute. And sadly, most parents and students will join such places.

So, if you consider money to be important, you should be joining an institute whose alumni are earning a lot more after 5-10 years (and later) into the industry, and not those where an odd graduating student is earning a lot more in the first one month after the graduation. And there are many good institutes whose alumni are doing very well or are likely to do very well (in case of relatively new institutes), but there immediate placement record may not be that great.

But in the absence of any scientific survey of alumni with 5-10 years of experience, how do you know which institutes are likely to give you that push. Well, as I said above. You need two things: good quality education, and developing an interest for life long learning. Both these will depend primarily on the quality of faculty. And the latter (interest in life long learning) can be guessed by the number of students who are going for higher technical education, be is MS or MTech or PhD. So check for two primary pieces of information: quality of faculty, and percentage of students going for higher technical education.

When I look at the lists prepared by students of the order in which they will seek admission, I am sometimes shocked. I visit the website of the two colleges, and at the outset it is absolutely clear as to where the faculty is far superior in every respect, and one still goes for the other place because the closing rank last year was better, or because someone said that a company offered a huge amount of salary to one student.

Some people talk about brand names. The big universities spend a huge amount of money on advertising, and that obviously creates a brand recall. (Today, education sector has one of the largest budget for marketing in India.) In this game, the small universities are ignored by students and parents. But a lot of small universities provide excellent education. The brand name also means that corporate HR guys have heard the names, and they too come to those campuses. But as I said above, campus placement should be only one of the many criteria for deciding the college. The main criteria has to be quality of education, which primarily depends on the quality of faculty.

Another bias that I notice on these forums is that government colleges are better than private colleges. I can understand (and myself advocate to an extent) joining an IIT even if the faculty size is very small, compared to a non-IIT with good faculty, because the brand value is just too high, and that does help in one's career, but I notice that the closing ranks in some of the NITs, IIITs, etc., are very good, even though few private places (like BITS, IIITH, DA-IICT, and LNMIIT - the last one isn't exactly private but a partnership between Rajasthan Government and Mr. Lakshmi Mittal) may have superior faculty. Some NITs are excellent, no doubt. But many of them really suffer badly from lack of faculty.

Enough ramblings. Now the parameters:

• The most important component that goes into making a good institution is a good faculty. So when you visit the website of a department, look for the following information:
  • Number of full-time faculty members. Please make sure that you read the details, and find out who is a full-time faculty member, and who is a part-time or adjunct faculty member. The important parameter is faculty to student ratio.
  • Their qualificiations. How many are PhDs. Where did they do their PhDs. Similarly, how many faculty members are having MTech qualification. Where did they do their MTech.
  • If a significant portion of faculty received their highest degree (whether PhD, MTech, or BTech) from the same college, then that should raise some alarms. On the other hand, faculty members having a lower degree from the same college, implies that they value the place enough that they returned back to the same place after getting a higher degree from elsewhere.
  • If the highest qualification for any faculty member is BTech or MCA, then be alarmed. Top places will only higher PhDs. Good places may have some MTechs. But if colleges are hiring BTechs and MCAs for teaching courses, it means that they are not able to attract enough good faculty, and that should be a cause for concern.
  • What are faculty doing. Are they teaching three courses a semester or two. Are they doing at least some bit of research publications.
• Research output of a department is another factor to look at. This will also add to your judgment about the quality of faculty. The better the faculty, the better should be the research output. One might argue that research is not that important for undergraduate education. Firstly, I do not agree with that statement. Doing research keeps a teacher uptodate on the area, and makes his/her understanding of the subject better. This can only help the quality of teaching. But more importantly, research flourishes when there is an institutional support for it. If faculty members are doing research, then it shows that the college management is serious about the quality of education. Research can be measured by the following parameters. (You may need help from someone in the academic community to really understand these parameters. Go ahead and ask whoever you know.)
  • Publication by faculty members. Higher preference should be given to peer-reviewed journals and conferences of high quality and reputation. Then one should also look at local conferences. At least someone is putting some effort in the right direction.
  • Sponsored research projects by various funding agencies like Department of Science and Technology (DST), AICTE, Dept of Information Technology, etc.
  • Any industry interaction in terms of research projects or consultancy.
  • Do they invite several researchers to give seminars.
  • Do they organize workshops and conferences.
  • Does college management have any scheme to reward good research.
• How is the Infrastructure at the college. In CS/IT areas, what you really need is a bunch of PCs with some standard softwares, something that increasingly students are anyway affording on their own. But still there are pieces of infrastructure that the college has to provide. Also, how good is their support staff to manage that infrastructure. Here is what you can check. (For many of these things, website may not be good enough source. You may need to ask a student there.)
  • What is their Internet bandwidth. (Consider the per capita bandwidth.)
  • How good is the library both in terms of books as well subscription to journals.
  • How good are hostels. Do they have cooling (other than fans), very important in most parts of the country.
  • Do they have sports facilities on campus. (This also reflects my bias that residential campuses are generally better for quality of education than campuses where students are day scholars.)
• Look at the Curriculum of the college. If the college is a university or a deemed university, only then it has the flexibility of deciding its own curriculum. Otherwise, it has to follow what the university prescribes. Some of the things to look for in the curriculum are:
  • How many courses do they teach. Unlike the conventional wisdom in India, I believe that the college that teaches you less is a better college. It means that they do less spoon feeding, and give you more space to grow and learn. If you look at international examples, MIT and other top universities have as low as 32 courses as the requirement for undergraduate degree. The next level universities in US require upto 36 courses for the undergraduate program. In India, IITs and the other top departments usually have 40-42 courses in the undergraduate curriculum. Some of the deemed universities require around 45 courses, and many of the technical universities require even 60 courses in the undergraduate curriculum. There are surely exceptions to this general trend, but by and large colleges will try to teach you more, if they know that they are doing a poor job of teaching, and hope that if they try teaching you lots, then perhaps in some courses they will be able to teach you something.
  • How many electives are there in the curriculum, giving flexibility to the students to learn what they are interested in. Many colleges may have slots for electives, but they treat that slot as their choice to offer a course. So they won't offer three courses, and ask students to chose one. But instead they will offer one course of their own choice (basically for whatever course they can find a faculty). Also, in most colleges, the curriculum will only contain professional electives, but no open electives.
  • Do they have enough number of humanities and social science courses (at least 10 percent courses). One cannot be a complete engineer without understanding economics, sociology, psychology, etc.
• Another parameter in determining a good college is to look at what happens to their students after they graduate. After all, you want to study there because you feel that the education will result in a good career for you. But, the problem in this parameter is that you really want to understand what happens to alumni after say, 5 years, when they have stabilized in the life. But getting that data is extremely difficult. And second, there is a danger that the college may have deteriorated in the last few years. So, unfortunately, you will have to just see what students are doing immediately after graduation. Because of this, do not over-emphasize this parameter. So look for the information on the following:
  • How many people are going for higher studies, whether in India or abroad, whether for doing MS/MTech or for doing MBA. This is much more important than placement statistics, since today, higher education is the key to success. So, if a larger percentage of students are going for higher education, it means that a larger percentage of students are going to do well in their respective careers a few years down the road. Also, as far as higher education in technical field is concerned, it is a reflection of how much passion for studies the faculty has been able to imbibe amongst the students.
  • Do look at the campus placement statistics, but take everything with a pinch of salt. People lie so much, or do not explain what they mean by the statistics that they share. I have seen claims of more than 100 percent placement, for example (which basically means that number of jobs is more than number of students, but it does not tell you how many students are still without a job). But some of the things one could look at include:
    • What all companies did they attract for campus placement. Do they attract only those companies who have local offices, or companies with no presence in the local town also come to the college.
    • What percentage of their students have at least one job offer.
    • What is the median salary offer. (Maximum salaries are attractive but very deceptive. Beware of colleges which only talk about the highest salaries.)
  • Do these students care about the college after they graduate. In particular, does college have an associated Alumni Association. Is there any interaction (not necessarily donations, may be just visits) between alumni and the college.
• What do others say about this college.
  • Have they been ranked by any major survey like India Today, Data Quest, etc. Note that most of these surveys are only about perceptions and not realities. And it is not that easy to get all the comparable information any way. So take the ranking information with a HUGE pinch of salt.
  • Has the college gone through any formal accreditation by AICTE (NBA) or NAAC, etc. If yes, what is the result.
  • Is it a univeristy or deemed to be university.
  • I wouldn't be swayed by the number of MoUs or exchange programs that a college may have with so-called foreign universities.
• On a couple of occasions above, I have referred to the status of Deemed University. In my opinion, it is very important to have a university status. With this status, you can decide your own academic processes, including curriculum, exams, grading, and even admissions, etc. Invariably, colleges with this kind of autonomy have much better quality of education than others. There have been some recent concerns about deemed universities based on report by one "Tandon Committee." I would say that one shouldn't worry about this report, certainly not about the universities in the list 'B' (which have supposedly been given three years to rectify some presumed weaknesses). I personally wouldn't bother about list 'C' either.