Professional courses highly popular

Wth more and more high scorers from across the country vying for a seat at Delhi University, Delhi students seem to have turned their attention on professional courses. And the surge at Guru Govind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIP), which provides only professional undergraduate and postgraduate courses, only goes to prove this point.

GGSIP, where majority of colleges have 85 per cent seats reserved for Delhi students, has this year sold an impressive 1.61 lakh applications for only 13,500 seats. This is an increase of 20 per cent over last year’s (when 1.34 lakh forms were sold). In comparison, Delhi University, which offers 35,000 undergraduate seats, sold 1,35 lakh forms this year.

BTech, BBA, MBA, Law, BCA and MCA are the most sought after courses. Moreover, the number of applications for BTech has doubled in two years — from 30,751 in 2006, the number went up to 62,090 in 2008. In BBA the number has risen from 16,000 in 2006 to 25,000 this year.

“The number of professional colleges in Delhi has increased over the years. Moreover, in the last eight years colleges affiliated to GGSIP have grown in infrastructure, quality and the placement scenario has increased significantly,” said K.K. Aggarwal, vice-chancellor, GGSIP.

“As students become more confident about these colleges, the number of applications grow,” Aggarwal said. There has been a shift towards professional courses because career prospects in these fields has picked up, he added.

GGSIP has 15 engineering colleges affiliated to it and the Indira Gandhi Institute of Technology is the only engineering college for girls in Delhi. “After Netaji Subhash Institute of Technology there was a gap of almost 20 years before any new engineering college came up in Delhi and local students had to go to other states in search of opportunity,” said Nupur Prakash, Dean, University School of Information Technology at GGSIP. “Today we offer almost 4,000 engineering seats and at least 60,000 students (most from Delhi) took the Common Entrance Test,” said Prakash.

A huge increase in placements over the years has also contributed to the popularity of engineering colleges of GGSIP. “In 2007, a student of Bharti Vidyapeeth College of Engineering (Punjabi Bagh) was awarded the best intern award by TCS. IT companies like HP, IBM, Infosys have been coming for recruitments regularly,” said Prakash.

GGSIP has also got a tremendous response to its BBA course. However, the case is the same for DU, where 15,000 students applied this year for 180 seats, available across three colleges. “Market conditions are very ripe and the industry needs qualified personnel. However, increasing number of seats and institutions is not the answer,” said Poonam Verma, principal, Saheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, DU. “Many of these institutes are not doing a good job as far as summer internship, placement, course curriculum etc is concerned and these are areas that need to be addressed,” Verma said.

Aggarwal admitted not all colleges under GGSIP boast of good infrastructure, faculty and quality. “At least 50 per cent colleges have come up quiet well and given time and more investment in terms of land and infrastructure, they have the potential to excel.”