Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) had 7,248 dropout cases in the last five years.IIT students will now be able to enroll in BSc courses after completing one year of BTech as the government approves ‘exit’ option.- In 2018, the IITs enrolled over 11,000 students in its undergraduate and postgraduate courses.
And this, coupled with jobs and other options — are making these prized students dropouts from engineering colleges. In the last five years, as many as 7,248 students dropped out if IITs. The Ministry of Human Resource and Development revealed these statistics in the lower house of the parliament.
Over 2,000 of them dropped out in the last two years — and a majority of them are those pursuing postgraduate courses and doctoral programmes.
In 2018 alone, the IITs enrolled over 11,000 students across undergraduate and postgraduate courses. In the last two years, almost 1,400 students that left the course midway were from IIT’s Delhi and Kharagpur campuses.
The MHRD also said that the rise in dropouts at the postgraduate level may be due to lucrative job offers extended by the companies during the course.
Dropouts at the postgraduate level
According to PTI, postgraduate programmes at IITs recorded a dropout rate of over 50%. “Many students take admission into M.Tech programmes and over 50% of them quit as soon as they find a job," IIT-Delhi Director V Ramgopal Rao had said.
Masters students however could also be quitting as they are being offered jobs at state-owned firms, especially in Delhi. “On some occasions, we saw 60 students drop out from an M.Tech batch of 80. Then, we were forced to run the programme with just 20 students,” The Print reported citing Dheeraj Sanghi, a professor at IIT Kanpur.
"Over 50 per cent dropouts in masters programmes today in IITs only means that students value the jobs they get after their B.Tech more than the career they can build with their M.Tech degrees. How can we spend taxpayers money to offer free education to them, when they themselves see no value in such an education?” Rao added.
The institutes are now conducting regular counselling for academically weak students.
See also:
Indian government launches online aerospace engineering course for those who aspire to reach the moon
3 out of 4 graduates from top engineering colleges got jobs via campus placements, government data shows
IITs, NITs are facing a dearth of teachers as 6,000 posts lie empty