Tier II colleges go hi-tech to attract students

Even though the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are the first choice for graduate and post graduate students due to the quality of education, second rung colleges are trying to woo students with better infrastructure and high-speed, virtually-networked campuses which they claim has resulted into a jump in student applicants.

For instance, the Bapatla Engineering College in Guntur District, Andhra Pradesh which offers six B tech programmes, accredited by the National Board of Accreditation (NBA), has decided to take the plunge into network solutions in May this year to present a more attractive proposition to students.

The college, which had no technological infrastructure earlier deployed Cisco's solution called Digital Media System to enable a virtual classroom environment with remote broadcast and viewing of lectures along with on-demand materials which led to an increase in 30-40 per cent of student applications.

The view is echoed by most of the lesser known colleges who hold that multimedia-enabled classrooms and other technological facilities are considered a necessity more than a value addition by students. The Atmiya Institute of Technology in Rajkot, which has a campus of around 30 acres installed 40 access points within its premises and functions on a local area network (LAN).

Arun lohiya, executive director of Indus Institute of Technology and Engineering (IITE), Ahmedabad, said the recently established college was looking at technology in a big way to enable students to work on live projects without having to limit themselves in the classroom.

However, raising funds to instal state-of-the art network solutions does not come easy for institutes already strapped for funds.

An executive at a top IT company in the education space revealed that deploying a strong network solution within a campus costs no less than Rs 65,000 excluding the maintenance costs. This in turn has led companies in the education vertical like Cisco to create a finance arm to allow institutes to pay for the solution in instalments at a monthly or quarterly basis.

"There are over 30,000 professional colleges in India which fall under the second rung cadre and with the kind of competition seen in the education sector, having a WiFi-enabled network will no longer be sufficient to attract students, "Jagdish Mahapatra, vice-president, commercial (west), Cisco India and SAARC, said.

The company has already worked with top institutes like the IITs at Kanpur, Kharagpur, Roorkee, Lucknow, Presidency College in Kolkata etc but bets big on smaller colleges to drive the growth in deploying IT solutions by atleast 50 per cent.