How to choose engineering college for admission?

Every summer, millions of students have a tough time selecting the right engineering college that will open doors to an exciting career. While some colleges (such as the IITs) have a high brand recall because of their quality of education as is reflected by the achievements of their alumni and the research output of faculty and graduate students, other colleges have high brand recall due to advertising on a large scale. Smaller colleges cannot afford the same advertisement budgets and hence lose out on branding even if they provide good quality education. 

Smaller (and newer) colleges do not attract enough recruiters either. Companies that recruit thousands of students from campuses every year would typically not go to campuses where they are likely to get just 5-10 potential employees. And companies that recruit very few students would typically not add a new college to their recruitment drive.

The parameters

How qualified is the faculty?

How active is the faculty in research?

The number of faculty members.

Next, infrastructure

Other factors

The following should be given less weight than the faculty and infrastructure:

Status of the institute: a university status typically would mean greater academic freedom for innovation.

A fully-residential campus usually provides a better learning environment.

Curriculum: How often it is updated? How many courses do they teach? Note that an institute that have too many courses is in fact not likely to do a quality job of teaching.

Curriculum flexibility: How many electives does it offer? Do they actually offer a lot of choice in those electives? 

What do graduates do? Do they all go for jobs, or do they also go for higher education? If graduates are going for higher education, then it shows that the institute has been successful in igniting the interest of learning in the students.

A related point is the performance of students in third party exams like GATE, CAT, etc.

Is there an active alumni association (particularly for colleges, which are more than 10-15 years old?). If the alumni don’t care about this college, then why should anyone else?

Campus placement: Of course, it should be considered. Just don’t consider it as the only parameter.

 

Accreditation by NAAC or NBA.

 

Student activities: You want to enjoy your four years and not just spend time in labs and the library! So make sure that there are enough extra-curricular activities on the campus.Student participation in institute administration: Do they groom leadership qualities amongst the students?