Churning in tech education

IT was a recipe for the eventual implosion of a vast number of private engineering and BTech colleges that had sprouted in the country a couple of decades back. They had been unable to keep up with the dynamic challenges of the educational needs of students in a world that is fast shedding the old ways to embrace newer technology-driven industries. Ironically, they had come riding on the then industrial boom and privatisation of higher education. Set up to encash on a trend, they went bust as soon as the bubble burst. For, most of them were nothing but questionable and hollow teaching shops — devoid of qualified educators and proper credentials and infrastructure.

With students’ queues drying up and over 70-90 per cent seats going abegging, private engineering colleges across the country have been collapsing like ninepins in the past around eight years. Their plummeting placement and quality records have kept prospective students away. In the past three years, 37 BTech colleges have been forced to shut shop in Haryana alone. Engineering courses accounted for the majority of the 69 per cent seats going unfilled in 402 courses offered by Himachal Pradesh’s scam-tainted private universities in the 2020-21 session. The portents for engineering colleges in Telangana, Maharashtra, Kerala, Odisha and West Bengal are ominous as there are no takers for around 50 per cent of their seats in various streams.

However, this churning in the technical education sphere is not without a bright side. The disintegration calls for an urgent cleansing in the sector. As such fields of study as artificial intelligence gain prominence and demand for the once-coveted trades fades, it is time for the old order to change. A whole new set of millennials have spawned a flourishing industry in the virtual world where virtually anything and everything — cooking, travel, gardening, dance, music, beauty, couture et al — is being monetised. One opportunity for educationists lies in tapping their need to upscale basic technical skills.