× logo

The Free 30-Day CAT RC Course

"It is designed to help you excel in the upcoming CAT 2024 exam"

-By Lavleen Kaur Kapoor. Over 2,00,000+ Subscribers

read more

No thanks >

-->

In what comes as an inevitable yet shocking move by the All India Council of Technical Education (AICTE) a series of announcements have been made regarding the engineering colleges in India. For those living under a rock, AICTE is a national-level organization for technical (and management) education. The Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Human Resource Development heads it. AICTE is a legal authority that takes care of the planning, designing, and maintenance of standards, funding, maintaining uniformity of certification and awarding the technical (and management) education in the country.

A government committee headed by Mr. BVR Mohan Reddy, Chairman at IIT Hyderabad, released a 41-page report to AICTE in December 2018 based on which:

  1. AICTE has decided that no new approvals will be given to engineering colleges from the academic session 2020-21.
  2. AICTE has suggested that it would review the ‘new creation capacity’ of engineering colleges every two years from now.
  3. AICTE has also announced that no new seats will be added in the traditional streams such as mechanical, electrical, electronics, and civil.
  4. Also, for the existing institutes, AICTE will approve increasing seats in existing courses based only on capacity utilization.
  5. AICTE has urged the existing engineering institutes to focus on new technologies like artificial intelligence, the blockchain, data sciences, cybersecurity, and robotics, etc.

AICTE is taking such extreme steps due to the depleting quality of technical education in the country, a large number of seats remaining vacant in the engineering colleges and poor placements of the engineering graduates.


In a parallel universe of the postgraduate management education, the scenario is equally bleak. Until the early 2000s, management education was majorly taken care by the IIMs and a handful of established private schools in India. By 2016, around 3400 management schools (Government, Private, and Deemed, etc.) mushroomed in every nook and corner of the country offering 4.3 lakh seats (Source AICTE Annual Report 2015-16).

The present management education space in India is facing a multitude of issues like:

  1. A restricted number of seats in the top MBA colleges (Tier-1) like IIMs, FMS, XLRI, etc. in India
  2. The dearth of competent faculty
  3. Deficiency of industry training and hands-on training facilities  
  4. Lack of innovation and upgradation in pedagogy and curriculum
  5. Less focus on newer technology areas like artificial intelligence, the blockchain, data sciences, cybersecurity, and robotics, etc.
  6. Poor employability and low pay-scales offered to management graduates.

Due to the above reasons many students who do score decent percentile in the entrance exams like CAT and XAT, do not wish to compromise by settling in for low ranking Tier-2 and Tier-3 colleges. This leads to a large number of seats remaining vacant in B-schools.

The situation of the management and engineering colleges in India looks almost similar. In such times, it is scary yet worth giving a thought – Will the management schools bear a similar fate as the engineering colleges in India at the hands of AICTE?

Our intention is not to spread fear among aspirants who are busy preparing for admissions at various MBA schools for the 2019-21 session. This is to propel your thought towards the fact that QUALITY should always be valued more than QUANTITY.

Stay Informed, Stay ahead and Stay inspired with MBA Rendezvous