Choosing a college and course has always been a daunting task for students and parents. In order to make it a stress free process, PickACollege, an online platform has been especially designed for prospective engineering students and their parents to make informed choices as to the most fitting institution as per their needs.
It provides detailed information of not just the top engineering colleges in the country, but also the lesser known colleges.
The EDU-RAND Rankings form a critical input into PickACollege (PAC). The decision making tool and rankings of engineering colleges will help engineering aspirants make informed decisions about admissions. Options such as Search College, Compare Colleges, Campus Guide, Career after College are available on the website to facilitate students to make the choice best suited to them. Then there is College Finder which takes into account important factors like location, fee range and courses that might be preferable to the candidate in selecting a college.
In other words, PAC is a comprehensive repository of information on engineering colleges from across academic institutions spanning different geographies, disciplines and facilties. PAC can be accessed through its online platform as well as via a customized mobile app.
The rankings that appear on the PAC website are a result of data collected from publicly available records and through proprietary information. According to Pramath Raj Sinha, Managing Director, 9.9 Media, “The methodology used by RAND Corporation is tailored to compare and rank around 800 colleges nationally. Reputed for its work in benchmarking and ranking, RAND Corporation has efficiently designed a system that seeks to address the different elements of higher education today. It has arrived at this data through carefully corroborated sources, based on facts, by a team of PhDs and scientists.”
Adding to the aforementioned statement, Rafiq Dossani, Director, RAND Center for Asia Pacific Policy, says, “The EDU-RAND rankings rely entirely on objective measures of quality. We have been able to capture, using objective data, such key measures as students’ national employability and faculty quality. These are measures that most other ranking methods have calculated using subjective data, such as employers’ perceptions about a college. Further, we have calculated the rankings on a large scale, enabling students to compare over 800 colleges nationally on consistent parameters”.
The EDU-RAND 2015 rankings, now two years in the running, that appear on PAC are based on objective measurements of four components of quality – employability, research productivity, faculty qualifications and fill rates. All four components are scored on a scale of zero to ten, with ten amounting to the best performance on each outcome and zero the worst.
This year, 5 IITs – Delhi, Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras and Guwahati – attained the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th positions in the rankings. These rankings are being hosted on PAC. Under the private college category, the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani emerged as the best private engineering college in India.
To sum up, PAC has been customized such that it makes the formidable task of picking what’s best for prospective engineering students seem like a cakewalk.
