Farce of an education in engineering

In the over 700 engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh there are 3,20,000 seats. In the entrance exam, EMCET, 2,50,000 appear. Of these 2,18,000 qualify (i.e get 25 per cent marks). But 30,000 qualified students fail in the intermediate exam, and therefore are not eligible to be admitted.

As many as 30,000 choose not to study in AP; they are not sure whether they would complete the course within four years, in view of the frequent bandhs and postponements of exams caused by agitations for and against Telangana.

Serious students opt to study in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. We are now left with 1,58,000 who may join the engineering colleges, against the admission capacity of 3,20,000.

A large number of engineering colleges have been opened by persons who made lot of money in various businesses. Investment in buildings is an outlet for untaxed money.

SHELL COLLEGES

These colleges have all been permitted by the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE), generally without site inspection or checks on whether the required laboratories, equipment, teachers, library, hostel and other facilities are available.

The Government of Andhra Pradesh is reimbursing the fees for about 85 per cent of those admitted. They are characterised as poor, minority, SC & STs. What is required is only a caste/religion certificate which can easily be purchased.

A person admitted in the engineering college will have to spend about Rs 600 only, and he will get after four years a certificate that he is an engineer.

While the nursery and secondary education is expensive, an engineering degree is very cheap – one can get it for Rs 600. One who joins an engineering college need not study at all. Questions are given and answers are dictated. Exams are confined to these questions.

Those who are unfit to be recruited by any private company join as assistant professors in the college from which they “graduate”.

If a good principal insists upon teachers teaching in English, then agitations are launched, saying that the principal is anti-social and social justice demands that nobody should be detained and that everybody be passed.

The college managements are not worried — they are, after all, getting their tuition fees from Government of Andhra Pradesh, though very late. So 90 per cent of the engineering colleges in Andhra Pradesh are turning out young men who are certified as “engineers” but not qualified to be employed except perhaps by government. Soon, this bubble of Andhra Pradesh becoming a reservoir of talented engineers will burst.

Professors must have an M. Tech degree. Many who are unfit to be employed by any private company are taking to M. Tech.

Not finding any employment, they take to M. Tech because they get a stipend. The infusion of such students will further degrade the quality of teaching and of course, the quality of learning.

QUALITY OF EDUCATION

The degradation of education has started at the intermediate level. A number of private junior colleges have come up. Though the number of colleges is far fewer than government colleges, these have more students. In these corporate colleges, education has been ‘poultrified'; hens are kept in cages, are fed to grow and then cut as broilers, or they lay eggs. In a similar manner, those admitted to these corporate colleges are made to read day and night. It is not textbooks that they read, it is answers to hundreds of questions that are likely to appear in exam papers.

The answers are rote-learned. No concept, no theory, no basic principles are taught. The colleges don't have laboratories. The training is for choosing the correct answer and not for understanding the subject or solving the problem. So, what is turned out is an exam talent and not knowledge talent.

Students know how to pass an exam, get into a professional college, get a job somehow and make money by whatever means. The rise in crime can be related to the rampant commercialisation of education.

Now, these corporate education businesses are invading secondary education. Techno-schools, concept-schools, IIT foundation-schools and so on are coming up. We might see the ‘poultrification' of secondary education.

At this rate, is it ever possible to build a prosperous, powerful and intellectual India?

(The author is Director, Centre for Telecom Management & Studies, and Chairman, Pragna Bharati, Andhra Pradesh.)

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