Are students in Gujarat losing interest in professional (engineering, business management, etc) education, or is the country’s industrially fastest growing state experiencing a glut of professional education institutions?

State education department officials are keeping their fingers crossed as the admission process for professional courses in Gujarat moves into the final stages amid fears that the vacancies in engineering, MBA, MCA, pharmacy and para-medical programmes may rise to 25 percent this year.

“Average vacancies in professional colleges were 20 percent last year and  around 11 percent in 2011,” says a state government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. This despite the number of students completing the school-leaving class XII science stream exam having risen from 68,000 in 2010 to over 100,000 this year.

Within the engineering stream as well, students’ preferences are changing. According to M.Y. Patil, officer on special duty, admission committee for professional courses (ACPC), five years ago information technology (IT) was the most preferred subject. In the past two years, it’s been electrical and this year it’s mechanical engineering. More than 44,000 students listed mechanical engi-neering as their first choice followed by 36,000 who opted for civil engineering.

Gujarat’s 21 government and 102 private engineering colleges offer 54,814 seats per year. Of them 16,230 are in mechanical, 9,950 in civil, 9,839 in electrical, 8,160 in computer, 7,080 in electronics and communications engin-eering and 3,555 in information technology. At the end of the second round of admissions on July 20, 7,767 seats were vacant, leaving college managements, who expected surplus demand, in shock. The maximum vacancies were in electronics and communications (1,291) followed by civil engineering (899), IT (884), electrical (852) and mechanical (791). Moreover, after they were selected and admitted, 6,585 students did not report for admission, thus adding to vacancies.

According to Janak Khandwala who heads the association of self-financed professional colleges, the no-show is attributable to the best students being admitted into the IITs and top-ranked non-IIT engineering colleges. “Their selection process started late and was completed just as the second round of counseling ended in Gujarat. Obvi-ously students selected here preferred to enroll in colleges with an all-India profile,’’ says Khandwala.

However Dr. Sumit Vyas, research fellow with the Biotechnology Aware-ness Programme, attributes declining student interest in professional education — especially engineering progra-mmes — to reckless capacity expansion which has created an acute faculty shortage. “Most engineering study programmes are conducted in English which has been neglected for several decades in Gujarat. Finding English fluent qualified faculty is a very difficult proposition, particularly for rural and semi-rural colleges. Hence the decline of interest in engineering education,’’ says Vyas.

This problem has been compounded by the increasingly liberal accreditation policy of the Delhi-based All India Council for Technical Education. According to official sources, in 2010, capacity was expanded by 6,299 seats in engineering, 1,500 in business management and 1,380 in pharmacy programmes in Gujarat. Between 2010-13, the total number of engineering seats increased from 31,714 to 54,815, a jump of almost 73 percent.

However, the general consensus is that the 125 privately-promoted B-schools in the state (pop. 62 million) are likely to be hit hardest by the current disenchantment with professional education combined with conti-nuous capacity expansion. Last year B-schools reported 3,800 vacancies which are expected to rise to over 4,500. “Falling pay and perks and shrinking job opportunities for B-school freshers are behind falling enrolment. Starting salaries for MBAs are down to Rs.10,000-15,000 per month, due to AICTE’s lack of quality consciousness and reck-less expansion of capacity,” says Dr. Manish Doshi, a spokes-person of the Gujarat Congress who has a doctorate in engineering from Gujarat University.

Evidently a large number of education entrepreneurs bought BJP chief minister Narendra Modi’s projection of a continuous industrial boom in Gujarat, and taking advantage of a liberal licencing regime, established professional education institutes. They should have done better homework.

R.K. Misra (Gandhinagar)