ABSTRACT
It is widely felt that this massive expansion in engineering education that has taken place during the post-independence period in India has been at the cost of quality of education. As noted earlier, except for a small number of graduates produced by a few institutions like the IITs and NITs, a vast majority of graduates are regarded ‘unemployable’ in any appropriate occupation (Aspiring Minds, 2019); in the global university ranking systems, very few institutions figure with high ranks, except a few IITs which also figure after top 100 or 200; in the national system of ranking (National Institute of Ranking Framework), a little less than 2 per cent of the institutions have been found to have scored above 50 per cent marks; less than 5 per cent of the engineering graduates are found to have been qualified in the graduate attitude test in engineering (GATE); and hardly 5 per cent of the colleges received ‘full accreditation’ by the national accreditation body, the National Board of Accreditation (NBA) (VIF, 2019); even the pass rates in undergraduate studies are very low (Mani & Arun, 2012). Thus, there are strong and well-articulated views on the poor quality of engineering education in the country. Further, international comparative studies (Loyalka et al., 2019, 2021) have shown that Indian engineering institutions compare poorly with those in the US in equipping students with higher-order thinking abilities and academic skills; though elite institutions in India do better, they still perform very poorly compared to elite institutions in the US. The widely prevalent views on the quality of education are also based on robust empirical evidence, but mostly based on the information collected from the educational institutions, employers and other stakeholders, but for studies by Loyalka et al. (2019, 2021), which are based on large surveys of skill acquired by students. Experts and several committees (e.g. AICTE, 2003, 2018; Banerjee & Muley, 2009; Biswas et al., 2010; MHRD, 2011; World Bank, 2013; Anandkrishnan, 2014; Loyalka et al., 2016; Government of India, 2019, 2020) that examined the status of engineering education in India have also commented in this context on institutional expansion, poor infrastructure, less provision of postgraduate and research programmes, commercialisation, ineffective regulation, lack of governance, state control and absence of autonomy, lack of qualified teachers, inadequate public funding, policy vacuum, outdated curriculum, old-fashioned teaching methods, irrelevant skills and knowledge provided by the engineering colleges and universities, weak linkages between universities and industry and so on. They also made valuable recommendations on these aspects. Many recommended improvement in infrastructure, faculty recruitment, autonomy, increased public funding, raise in fees, faculty training, restructuring of regulatory institutions, planned and regulated growth, focus on research and postgraduate programmes, restructuring of curriculum, including increase in market relevance of curriculum and introduction of ethics, and so on. A majority of such studies are based on surveys of institutions, so are many of the reports of the expert committees, but not necessarily of students. There are a few studies in India that are based on student surveys; but these surveys covered several aspects relating to their socio-economic background, expenditures on education and employment/unemployment (Rao, 1961; Bose et al., 1983; Senthilkumar & Arulraj, 2011), but they rarely focused on quality-related aspects and how students perceived the quality of their education. Using students’ surveys, Uplaonkar (1983) analysed occupational preferences by gender and Singh (1993) examined costs of higher education in University of Delhi. Vijay (2013) analysed student ratings of quality of higher education using sigma model approach in India.
