Second Rung Emerging
If one were to unearth the single biggest trend in the T-School survey, it would be the rise of the National Institutes of Technology or the NITs. All NITs except calient have improved their rankings.

The biggest rise has been of NIT-Warangal, which broke into the Top 10 club.

According to the survey findings, NIT-Warangal has shown improvement in academic environment especially in the batch strength of the PhD course in engineering. The HR score of this institute has also increased considerably as compared to last year.

Not only that, there are six NITs in the Top 20 list. Of these, NIT-Hamirpur has shown the most remarkable improvement in terms of ranking-moving up 14 places. The survey attributes the rise of NIT-Hamirpur to its marked improvement in every parameter like placement, infrastructure, academic environment, industry interface, and HR score. Major improvement areas were the number of IT companies visiting the campus for placements, and average number of research papers.

NITs have been envisaged as the second rung to IITs in India. Originally called as Regional Engineering Colleges (RECs), in 2002, the Union Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, decided to upgrade, in phases, all the original 17 RECs as NITs, on the lines of the prestigious IITs. There are currently 20 NITs, the latest being NIT-Agartala. The government is quite ambitious about the NITs, as the Cabinet has approved a proposal to introduce the NIT Bill 2006 in the parliament to bring these institutes within the ambit of the Act, and giving them a high-level of autonomy.

Meanwhile, the IIITs continue to remain in the top contention- IIIT-Hyderabad is ranked #9 (last year it was #10) and IIIT-Allahabad, #13. The IIITs were conceived to be forerunners in the IT education sector. The course curriculum at these institutes is at par with similar offerings at most computer science departments of other reputable universities. Overall, the second rung of T-Schools is coming into the fore, and that is a good sign.

A Matter of Perception
An important aspect of the T-School survey is the Perception Score. A host of IT companies like Infosys, Wipro, Cadence Design System, Patni, HP, Hexaware and CSC were asked to rate the different Tech schools on a 10-point scale. The score gives an insight on the schools that are favored by the IT companies, especially in terms of campus placements. Overall, job opportunities are on a rise as percentage campus placement increased to touch 87% this year compared to 72% last year.

IITs and the NITs were hot favorites in terms of campus placements, touching close to 90% placement similar to last year. The private institutes have also increased their placement performance to 75% from 60% last year. IIT-Madras, IIT-Mumbai, and IIT-Kharagpur were the toppers in T-School perception score. NIT Tiruchirapalli was ranked #9 and NIT Warangal #10. BITS-Pilani scored quite well on the HR Perception score and is ranked #7.

IT companies recruited 34% of total engineering students produced by top 100 engineering colleges. Some of the colleges that seemed to have found favor with IT companies are: DA-IICT (Gandhinagar), PES Institute of Technology (Bangalore), SSN College of Engineering (Chennai) and others, as these institutes cater specifically to the needs of the IT sector by having courses that are aligned with the needs of the industry. On an average about 73% of the students from Top 100 institutes get placements from institute through campus placement/off-campus placement programs before completion of their course.

The survey also brings to fore areas of improvements that are desired by IT recruiters. The chief concern was soft skills, namely training of communication, presentation, attitude for 74% of respondents and industry-relevant curriculum for 53% of the respondents. Close to 47% of recruiters spoke about the quality of students and wanted the industry and institutes to work on improving the same.

Page(s)   1  2  3