Maharashtra has over 350 engineering colleges and 1.3 lakh seats, yet it lags behind engineering colleges down south in terms of industry participation.
Besides poor campus placement initiatives, colleges here don’t make the effort to impart entrepreneurship skills in students, says a latest All India Council for Technical Education-Confederation of Indian Industry (AICTE-CII) report.
The survey highlights loopholes in technical education and the need for industry collaboration to enhance the skills and employability of youngsters.
It places only 17% engineering colleges of Maharashtra in the high performance category, 77% in the medium performance category and 6% in the low performance one.
Of the 156 colleges in India, all minimum 10 years old, that voluntarily participated in the survey, Walchand Institute of Technology, Solapur, (ranked 2nd), College of Engineering, Pune, (7th), and Kasegaon Society’s College, Sangli, (10th) are among the top 10. Only 18 colleges from state participated.
The colleges were assessed on the basis of curriculum, faculty, infrastructure, campus placement, services, and governance and entrepreneurship development. Only six streams — electrical, mechanical, civil, chemical, electronics and communication, computer science and IT — were surveyed.
SK Mahajan, director of technical education, said, “The six state colleges in the top 50 have industry giants or ex-directors of national level research organisations in their governing bodies. They guide them on how to train youth as per market needs. Colleges which didn’t participate have a huge gap in this respect.They need to pull up their socks.”
