How to Choose an Engineering College (2022)

This is an updated blog article on engineering admissions to colleges other than the top few like IITs. I wrote one with exactly the same title  in 2015 and another one in 2009. This one has a large overlap with the article I wrote in 2015. After all what parameters indicate a college to be providing quality education hasn't changed all these years. But my learning and experience in the last one decade, particularly working with IIIT Delhi, PEC Chandigarh and now at JKLU Jaipur has given me insights into what are the typical questions students and parents have at the time of admission.
 
The reason I wrote this in 2009 and again in 2015 is rather simple. I get lots of emails on my views on different engineering colleges, and request to compare this with that. I am not in the habit of comparing things based on what I have read on social media or what I have heard in the corridors. And hence in most cases, I have to decline any comments. And I thought instead of just saying that I have no opinion, I could give them an algorithm to make some progress in coming to a decision. And hence this article.

First of all, which is a good college. Yes, I know. The highest package. Sorry, I disagree.

Let me suggest an alternative. It prepares you to achieve your goals. And, of course, your goal could be to be rich. But you don't become rich by having large paycheck in the first month. You become rich by having a long paying career. The first job is no guarantee of a successful career. And placement statistics anyway are most unreliable. So may be you should be looking at how alumni are doing 5-10 year hence rather than how final year students are doing. But then that statistics is even harder to get. (But don't worry, I will talk about how placement statistics can give you limited insights regarding quality little later in the article.)

So let us look at factors that are most likely going to lead to a successful career. These factors are:

• Your passion and interest in the area you are working in
• Your preparedness as far as knowledge and skills are concerned (this is why the quality of education is so important)
• Your ability to keep learning lifelong as most things a college will teach you will be outdated over the next 5-10-20 years and your career is 50 years (this is why good faculty is absolutely important - to not just teach you some technical stuff, but mentor you to learn how to learn yourself)
• Your soft skills, attitude, ethics, etc. (this is best learnt at school, but a good college would improve upon this, particularly a residential campus where you learn many things from hostel activities)
• Your network of friends (this is where a good college which attracts more good students will help), and
• A huge amount of luck.

This article is not about choosing a branch, though I would like to add that if you do not have a particular interest in a discipline (and most 12th class students don't - it is ok), then prefer a good college over a popular discipline.

And this article is not about luck. I can just wish you all a huge amount of luck.

So let us focus on the other factors.

The most important factor is the quality of faculty. It not only helps you in learning how to learn lifelong, but also ensures that you pick up adequate knowledge and skills from the program. How do we know which college has a better faculty than the other. Well, visit their website, and 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. Try to see the full time equivalent (FTE) like two part-time faculty teaching one course in every semester together will be one FTE. Also check the number of students. The important parameter is faculty to student ratio.
• Their qualifications. How many are PhDs.
• Where did the faculty members study. If they did one of their degrees from IITs/BITS and other fine institutions in India or abroad, they are more likely to have achieved academic excellence early in their lives, and at the very least, they have been exposed to quality systems and education and they will more likely pass on that quality experience to their students.
  
• 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 but a higher degree from a different institution, 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.

Of course, people will argue how important it is to be a PhD to be a good teacher. And I have no doubt that there are some excellent teachers who are not PhDs, and there are some lousy teachers who are PhDs. However,  there is no doubt that places which have a lot of non-PhD teachers have them because they failed to attract PhD faculty, not because they just hired great teachers, and it so happened that many of them were MTechs. And if you look at the background of those MTechs, it is quite unlikely that you will find many of those MTechs from IITs, IISc, and other top institutions. And, in general, PhD from a good university would have a higher chance of being a good teacher than an MTech from a tier two college.

Another factor that gives an indication of the quality of faculty is the research output of the institution. I believe that there are good researchers who are not good teachers, and similarly, there are good teachers who are not good researcher. However, in general, faculty members who are actively pursuing some research interests would be current on the subject and would have a deeper understanding of the topics. 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. 

The problem in checking research output is that it is very difficult for a layman to even get an idea. It is very difficult to know which journals and conferences are good and which are paid ones. In any case, most of the Tier 3 and Tier 2 institutions aren't doing great on this parameter. But if you have a friend in academia, a faculty member, they may be able to advise you on this parameter.

Now, let us look at the second factor for a successful career. That is, level of preparedness or the knowledge and skills learned. This will, of course, depend on quality of faculty, which we have already discussed. But it requires a couple of other parameters as well. Most important of them is the curriculum. 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. 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.A good college may have 40-45 courses in the curriculum, while a poor quality college may have more than 50 courses.
• 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 choose one. But instead they will offer one course of their own choice (basically for whatever course they can find a faculty). Elective slots are important since a student will develop interest in some topics more than the others and may want to build his/her career in that sub-field.
• Also, the electives should not just be in the discipline area but there should also be open electives. If someone wants to study maths or design or business studies along with Computer Science, it should be possible to do so. The more diverse your courses are, easier it will be for you in the future to keep learning new things and remember, you have to keep learning for at least 50 years.
  
• 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. These courses also develop important skills like Critical Thinking. And come to think of it. No college can teach you anything which will not become obsolete in the next 10 years. But if they can give you skills like Critical Thinking, you will go far in your career.
• Overall, curriculum should be multi-disciplinary whether through some compulsory core or through a large set of electives. Most problems that you will face in your life will require inputs from multiple domains. So if you are doing BTech in Computer Science and the college teaches you 20-25 courses in CS, they are not doing justice to your future growth. It ought to be much less with a lot of components from other fields.
  

A lot of learning happens outside the classroom, and hence a residential institute should be preferred over a place where all are day scholars. If there is a mixed system (that is, some live in hostel, and some are day scholars), it is still better than fully day scholar since even if there are some students on campus 24x7, it would have facilities that even day scholars can use when necessary. You won't have all labs close at 5 or 6pm. The library is likely to be open late. Indeed, one of the parameters to look at while understanding the quality of an institute is whether they allow access to their facilities for long hours, or are they only from 9 to 5 on weekdays.

Another important criteria is the autonomy of the institute. Can they decide their own curriculum. Typically, universities (including deemed-to-be-universities) can decide their own curriculum, and in general I would strongly recommend universities over affiliated colleges. Teaching someone else's curriculum is demotivating for teachers. If they do not have much stake in the curriculum, it would also invariably mean that exams are also conducted by someone else (by the universities, except for some "autonomous" colleges), and that means students don't care for the classes and teachers. This can not be conducive for lifelong learning, not even for immediate learning. But, of course, a vast majority of engineering education happens in such affiliated colleges, and most of it is poor quality. This is generalization, and certainly there are some affiliated colleges which are doing a decent job.

Fancy infrastructure is not something that impresses me, but yes, they should have all the necessary labs, good Internet bandwith, WiFi access so that you can use your own laptops and other devices anywhere, a good library with lots of reading spaces, lecture rooms without a projector is like living in dark ages, adequate sports facilities, etc. (Caution: Some of the engineering colleges would have all of this and more, but would not have faculty. Look at infrastructure only after you are convinced about the faculty and curriculum, etc.)

To ensure that your peer group is strong (since so much of learning will happen outside the class room, and your career will be helped by a good peer group), one may want to look at data such as what was the median performance of the admitted students in 10th board, 12th board, competitive exams like JEE, CUET, etc. Of course, it is extremely difficult to get this data and even more difficult to verify this data. An indication could be available through the minimum eligibility announced by the university. For example, if I am allowed to do some marketing for JKLU, we have announced a minimum eligibility of 70% in 10th and 70% in 12th (counting only 5 subjects in 10th and PCME in 12th, so your additional subjects with 98-100 marks are not counted) for BTech/CSE program. I am not aware of any other private institution that has such high eligibility requirement. As a result, our median 12th class marks are more than 85%, one of the highest in our peer group. But, if you can't get this data from other colleges, you may ignore this parameter.

Now, let me come back to the all important question of placement. Why do I say that one should not look at placement data.

Well, if you want to look at placement data from the perspective of return-on-investment, then you should be looking at the incomes over at least 10-15 years, if not 50 years. The first month salary has no correlation with long term success in career. Second, you have no idea about the placement statistics. Most of the time, even the students who are going through the placement in a college and talking to all their friends on a regular basis about where they have got placed usually have no clue about aggregate statistics. (Very surprising, I know, but I can give you many examples and explain why this happens later.) The colleges exaggerate. Are you sure you will be the one to get that highest package. No one can predict what will happen 4 years from now.

On the other hand, if you are looking at placement as a proxy for quality and saying that if top companies are coming here, they must have done a survey and decided that this college is good, then what should be the parameter to look at. Let me give you two examples to compare. Both colleges have 100 graduating students in the same discipline. First college, two students get a package of Rs 1 crore, and 98 students get a package of Rs 3 lakhs each. In the other college, everyone gets a package of Rs 5 lakhs. Which one is better. In my opinion, the second one is better quality. If the first one was good, how much that goodness reflected in just 2 jobs. Most probably, those two worked hard on their own despite college and not because of college. And hence quality is reflected not in highest package but in median package, which is the package that the middle or average student got. Most colleges will only talk about highest and average (since few getting high packages will lift the average). No one talks about median since that is usually the lower number. So, if you can find median number reliably (very difficult), you may think of using that as a proxy for quality. Otherwise, ignore the placement data.

What else you should not look at. Well MoUs can be signed a dime a dozen with foreign universities, with companies and so on. Please look at how many of them are effectively being worked on. Rankings are usually gamed. There is no verification process.

Then there are things which do not really matter in terms of quality, but could be important for you. Feel free to factor them in, and indeed they are important. One is Geographical location. Many people have preference to stay close to home or away from home, in a similar cultural environment or in a similar weather condition, etc. This is fine. The other is finances. If the two places you are considering have very different costs, then one has to look at whether those differences are worth the extra cost. And it is never going to be easy to take a call on that.

The last point I will make is that this is one of the most important decision of your life. Invest your time, effort, and even money into this decision making. Don't be lazy and just look at last year's closing ranks, or just looking at some lists on some sites. Do primary research. First visit the website and note down as much relevant information as possible. Then talk to people who may give you insider's information. Make a shortlist of colleges you are interested in. Then plan a visit even if the college is not in your city. This is very important and this is what I meant when I said above invest your money in decision making.

When you visit a place, you will know many things about the place which are difficult to judge otherwise. Many institutions have some special things which may appeal to you or may not be in line with what you desire. Talk to random students and faculty on the campus to get the real picture and not just the admissions team. For example, and again, marketing alert for JKLU, here the way we do Project based learning is completely different from everyone else in the country, our semester away program in IITs, IIITs, and fine institutions abroad, our Center for Communication and Critical Thinking, our Design thinking courses, and many more things are so unique but you won't be able to really understand their import just by looking at the website.

Best wishes for a great career ahead.

Migration Certificate in Indian Universities

There is this strange document called a "Migration Certificate" that a lot of (if not most) Indian universities demand after admission. The previous university where you studied (or school) is supposed to give such a certificate which essentially says that this student studied in our university in this program from this time to that time, and whether s/he got the degree or left in between.

Interestingly, IIT Kanpur is one of the few universities who do not ask for migration certificate (unless something has changed in the last few years). Of course, some students would attach it by sheer force of habit. Also, when one of the graduates or alum asks IIT Kanpur to issue a migration certificate, it states on its letterhead something to the effect that Inter University Board of India and Ceylon had recommended abolition of migration certificate and hence it does not issue such a certificate. But it has no objection to its graduate (with details) in seeking admission to any place.

This recommendation of Inter University Board of India and Ceylon is from 1972. (In 1973, the name of the body changed to Association of Indian Universities.) IIT Kanpur abolished migration certificates in 1973.

And yet, 50 years later, most of our universities (including IITs) continue to seek such a certificate.

Why was it needed and why was it abolished.

The main purpose of the certificate was to ensure that a student does not take admission in more than one university. If the student has to submit the migration certificate in original, then s/he can submit it at only one university, and hence this was the way to enforce the rule. However, IUBIC noted 50 years ago that this is not so simple. A student can simply go to the previous university and tell them that s/he has lost the migration certificate and get a duplicate one. So the universities were anyway seeking an undertaking that the student is not studying at another university. So that should suffice. If s/he has been found to give a false undertaking, you can take the same action that the university would have taken if the student used duplicate migration certificate in two universities.

After a while, even this rule about studying in two universities got dropped. In fact, AICTE and UGC are actively forcing universities not to keep original certificates. The student should be able to seek admissions in multiple institutions and take a decision on which one to continue much later. And indeed, today, UGC allows you to have admission in one full time program and one online degree program simultaneously. So whatever limited purpose migration certificate had is completely lost today.

Why do universities demand this. Of course, guidelines or recommendations of AIU are not binding on the universities. So legally, I guess they can ignore this 50 year old guideline. (And may be, AIU has changed its guidelines in the last 50 years and IIT Kanpur is ignorant of such a change.)

My gut feeling is that this is looked at as an instrument of control, and a bit of revenue. Many universities do charge money to issue migration certificates, and if many graduate needs a copy, that can certainly pay for a few cups of tea. And if we are making money giving out this certificate, we better seek this certificate from others, since if the idea of not seeking MC catches on, we will lose our cups of tea.

I would love to hear from others about its utility, if any, and why universities don't stop seeking it.

For the record, we at JK Lakshmipat University (JKLU) do not ask for migration certificate from our students.

Why one should study Engineering at JKLU?

 JEE results are out and students other than those who have performed exceedingly well and are preparing for JEE Advanced, are now starting to think of what engineering college they want to choose for their under-graduate education.

So let me warn. This is a marketing post. If you are thinking of a college for engineering or you know someone who is looking for admission to engineering programs, please do read, share, comment, get in touch, etc. Not interested in finding out the magic we are doing at JKLU, skip the rest of this post.

The most important reason to select a college is its quality of education, and the main proxy for this parameter is the faculty. (I know a lot of people consider placement statistics as a proxy for quality, so we will talk about that too later in this post, but let us talk about faculty for now.) There are three things I would like to state about our Engineering faculty:

• The faculty to student ratio in our engineering programs is 1:12. This is perhaps the best ratio in any engineering college in the country. And this does not include faculty of Communication, Humanities and Social Science, Management and Design, who do teach many courses. If we include them, then the ratio will be 1:10.
  
•  More than 75% of our engineering faculty has a PhD degree. Again, I am not sure how many engineering colleges (other than IITs, NITs, and a few top colleges like BITS, LNMIIT, etc.) can boast of such a percentage of PhDs. And this number is increasing. We stopped recruiting non-PhDs some time ago, and all existing non-PhDs have been asked to enroll in PhD programs.
• A majority of our engineering faculty have at least one degree from IITs, NITs, BITS or abroad. So they have been exposed to excellence and that builds a culture of excellence on the campus. Again, compare this with the background of faculty in other institutions that you are considering.

And it is not just that the faculty is great. The pedagogy is great too. JKLU strongly believes in Project Based Learning. We did this transition to PBL in 2018. Earlier too, we were claiming to do PBL like everyone claims. In 2018, we said to ourselves, let us find out the world leaders in PBL and understand how to do it right. We found out that Olin College near Boston is the Gold standard of PBL. And they run a one week program every summer to teach academics from around the world how they do it. We invested heavily into this, sent a team of teachers to Olin for that program, then brought their faculty to JKLU for further training and help in transitioning to PBL. This summer, we again deputed a team for this one week program at Olin. To understand what this is, you may read one of my old blogs on my Olin experience. So you start doing projects from the very first semester with a lot of guidance from faculty.

One of the flexibility in our system that we are really proud of is spending a semester at an IIT, IIIT or another fine institution. There are institutions like IIT Kanpur and IIT Gandhinagar who have a process of admitting students of other colleges for a semester or two. However, hardly anyone makes use of this facility. And why wouldn't you want to study in an IIT if you always wanted to be an engineer. The problem is that most colleges do not have a system of counting the courses done at those IITs towards their own courses. And the second problem is that most colleges will ask their student interested in spending a semester elsewhere to pay full fee at both their home institution as well as this other institution, making it very expensive for the student. In case of JKLU, we have a process of replacing our courses with the courses you do elsewhere and we do not charge you tuition for the semester you are studying elsewhere. This has meant that almost 10% of our students spend a semester elsewhere (or did before Covid, last 3 semesters have been an exception). In the year before Covid, we had 6 students spend a semester at IIT Gandhinagar alone. We also have an agreement with IIIT Delhi, one of the finest institution in India for Computer Science and related disciplines under which our students can spend a semester there (and despite Covid, one student is spending the current semester there).

We also have agreements with several foreign universities for our students to spend a semester abroad. Some of them reduce tuition for our students. Some of them make it easier for our students to get admission in Masters programs if they had spent a semester abroad with them. University of Amsterdam does not charge any tuition from our students. Universities where one can for semester abroad include University of Birmingham, University of Florida, and many others. Of course, we also allow our students to spend a semester in any fine institution abroad including those with whom we do not have a formal tie up. We truly believe that having a global exposure is very important for a career in today's world and provide such opportunities to our students. Do ask the colleges you are considering if they entertain a possibility of spending a semester abroad.

The cohort that you will study with will have good academic credentials. As of today, about 92 percent of our students admitted to engineering programs have scored more than 75% marks in their 10th class. The median 10th class score is 86%. (This year, with board marks in 12th class not always reflecting the academic preparation, we decided to take a look at 10th class marks, which are usually lower than 12th class scores.) Frankly, I do not know if even IITs can claim this in terms of school level performance of their students.

The next important consideration is that of cost. Not only we are charging tuition which is much less than our costs (with the JK group covering the losses), we are completely transparent about it. You can see the exact cost of all four years on our website. But the bigger deal is our extremely liberal and transparent scholarship regime. Please note that we have made scholarships extremely liberal this year to celebrate 10 years of the establishment of the university. In particular, we have made continuation of scholarship in all four years easier for this batch. Also, the scholarships cover not just the tuition but all academic fees and even hostel fees. On our scholarship page, you can find not just who is eligible for scholarship this year and how much scholarship you can get, you will also find out the conditions of its continuation in all four years. For students with JEE Mains percentile of greater than 92, one can actually study for free for all four years (other than the cost of mess and electricity). You won't find this kind of transparency, particularly regarding continuation of scholarship in successive years, in most colleges.

There are many other aspects of a great engineering college. Great infrastructure. A very green campus. Even though we are very small currently, the students are very active with lots of clubs, technical societies, sports, etc. They participate in several festivals of other colleges and conduct our own festivals (and did so even during Covid). We have a world class design school and they offer a couple of courses to all engineering students, and exposure to design is becoming almost a requirement in industry these days. We have been setup by 125-year old JK Organization, so our industry connect is really strong. The curriculum has the flexibility of several electives. You can choose to take courses in any of the latest streams like Machine Learning or Cyber Security or IoT or Automation, etc. We are one of the few institutions in India to setup Atal Incubation Center. So a strong support for your startup ideas. A great leadership team. The board is full of people who have built this nation. The academic council has people from best universities around the world. The internal leadership consists of people who have studied and worked in top institutions in the country.

And finally, let me talk about placements. My own belief is that one should focus on quality of education and not on placements because if you have a great quality of education, but campus does not see many companies visiting, you may not get the first job of your choice, but the quality of education will take you far. But I know most people are not convinced by this. We had great placements till 2019, but in the Covid years, we were hit a bit harder than other good colleges and in 2020 and 2021 graduating batches, the placement was between 80-85%, which is very good compared to most colleges, but not what we were used to. But as economy is back on track, we are making special efforts for 2022 batch, and within 2 weeks of our placement season, one third of our batch has already been placed with a minimum CTC of Rs. 4 lakhs. One should pay attention to minimum because if we were agreeable to companies paying 2 lakhs to 3 lakhs, we may have placed the entire batch so early in the year. The highest CTC so far is 10.0 lakhs though there are interviews pending for companies offering 15L and higher. The median is 6.3 lakhs. And those who know me personally would know that these are not cooked up numbers unlike most other colleges. The number of companies already committed to visit us in September are half the number of graduating students. Eventually, we expect the number of companies visiting us to be more than the number of students graduating.

So don't worry about the placement. Focus on your education. Focus on quality. Do hard work. Have high aspirations. Have the aspirations to change the world. And no doubt, you will succeed.

It is not possible to write down everything here. But let me invite each one of you to visit the beautiful campus and see things for yourself. You may contact me directly for any queries. You may visit admissions page at: https://applications.jklu.edu.in/lp/application2021.html

Best wishes. Jai Hind.