AICTE will make accreditation mandatory for colleges

The All India Council for Technical Education is going to make it mandatory for all colleges under its scrutiny to get accreditation. These colleges will be permitted to offer 10% of the curriculum through online mode.

The technical education regulator conducted a seminar on the “Perspective Plan for Approval of New Technical Institutions in the State of Maharashtra”. Majority of college heads said they were facing restless nights over large number of vacant seats and lack of clarity on which body to be contacted to make changes in the number of intake. The state government, on other side was worried about the quality of students completing their programmes from these colleges.

DTE director S S Mahajan said more colleges had more vacant seats as compared to previous years. Last year, 100 engineering colleges had more than 35% vacant seats, this year the number has reduced to 264. Besides, for diploma the count has increased from 190 to 275.

AICTE chairman said that crying over the vacant seats in these colleges, they must consider other points such as improving their course work and quality of the content. He said, “I agree that the technical education sector has expanded in capacity. But we are planning for the future. The average success rate of Class XII students is 50%. If that goes up and you have more students knocking at your door, how will you suddenly increase capacity?”

He felt that allowing expansions would only give a better choice to students and colleges that do not perform will rightfully perish.