Sadat Hussain dwells upon the high demand of professional courses in India as well as their history, rankings and roadmap for aspirants.
The objectives of education have been defined and redefined time and again. The journey of Indian Higher Education is a classic example of how the system adjusted to the needs of the industry and economy and redefined the goals of education. Accessing higher education, which was once a privilege of the elites, has been transformed and expanded to such a large extent that the academicians call this phenomenon massification of education.
Earlier the objectives of education were largely defined as the transmission of experience from one generation to the other, to internalise the values so that a holistic development of a learner could take place, to instil the knowledge and information among the learner, learning specialised skills and so on. Now after the establishment of the direct relationship between education and the market and industry, this phenomenon has grown massively after the boom in the service sector. Now the purpose of education is to learn a profession, skill/vocation. This type of education is identified as ‘professional education’.
So, professional education can be loosely defined as an exclusive training of a particular profession or vocation. It refers to imparting knowledge, skills and training to build a profession. This type of education not only provides academic and theoretical knowledge but also instils the command over application of the knowledge. Professional education can be in the form of degree programmes, vocational certificate programmes, continuing training, professional development programmes and so on.
In this article attempt shall be made to introduce degree programmes available in our country. In the area of professional education, Indian Higher Education system offers various programmes in the fields such as Engineering, Management, Pharmacy, Medical, Dental, Law, Architecture and Planning. These fields are in demand due to high rate of return on the investment (by parents) in the education in the form of high salary and stable job.
Nowadays the demand for popular areas in professional education is so huge that the system is facing demand and supply gap. This demand and supply gap can be explained by using the case of NEET. During 2022, 1872343 candidates were registered and 1764571 candidates appeared for the examination. To get a government seat of their choice one needs to get less than 1000 rank. The gap between the supply and demand of medical education for such candidates is too huge between 1764571 and 1000. As per reports,if we consider every other seats by the government medical college under state quota, the intake is 61205 seats. If we include overall intake (state and national quota) of government medical colleges in India, it will be around 1 lakh.
Similar demand and supply gaps can be found in other professional courses as well. It occurs due to the high demand from parents and students and lack of supply of a particular type of professional course in the form of intake in the desired colleges and universities.
In general, parents and students identify the colleges for professional courses largely based on the following criteria: 1) Employability (Campus Placement); 2) Good quality teaching and learning;3) Peer perception (about a college); and4) Ranking of the college. These factors play a crucial role in the popularity of a particular college/institute/university. These factors are interlinked as well. Recently released ranking of universities/institutes/colleges by the Ministry of Education as National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), MoE incorporates the parameters such as learning resources, peer perception, inclusivity, etc. to rank the higher educational institutions.
Below is a list of top 10 colleges offering various professional courses for the year 2023:
| Rank | Engineering | Management | Medical | Law | Dental |
| 1 | IIT Madras | IIM Ahmedabad | AIIMS New Delhi | National Law School of India University | Saveetha Institute of Medical and Technical Sciences |
| 2 | IIT Delhi | IIM Bangalore | PGIMER Chandigarh | National Law University | Manipal College of Dental Sciences |
| 3 | IIT Bombay | IIM Kozhikode | Christian Medical College Vellore | Nalsar University of Law | Dr. D. Y. Patil Vidyapeeth |
| 4 | IIT Kanpur | IIM Calcutta | NIMHENS Bengaluru | W.B. National University of Juridical Sciences | Maulana Azad Institute of Dental Sciences |
| 5 | IIT Roorkee | IIT Delhi | Jawaharlal Institute of PG Medical Education & Research, Puducherry | Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi | A.B.Shetty Memorial Institute ofDental Sciences |
| 6 | IIT Kharagpur | IIM Lucknow | Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham | Symbiosis Law School | SRM Dental College |
| 7 | IIT Guwahati | National Institute of Industrial Engineering, Mumbai | Sanjay Gandhi PG Institute of Medical Sciences | Gujarat National Law University | Sri Ramachandra Institute of Higher Education and Research |
| 8 | IIT Hyderabad | IIM Indore | Banaras Hindu University | Siksha‘O’ Anusandhan | Manipal College of Dental Sciences, Mangalore |
| 9 | NIT Tiruchirappalli | XLRI-Xavier School of Management, Jamshedpur | Kasturba Medical College, Manipal | Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur | Siksha ‘O’ Anusandhan |
| 10 | Jadavpur University | IIT Bombay | Sree Chitra Tirunal Institute for Medical Sciences and Technology | Babasheb Bhimrao Ambedkar University | Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi
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Source: National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), MoE (www.nirfindia.org)
From the website one can find the subsequent list of colleges for different professional courses. In recent years NEET, JEE, JEE (Advance) are in high demand because these exams act as standardised testing to filter out most of the aspirants of professional education.
Candidates with an interest in applied knowledge can very well pursue this field of education. However, candidates should keep in mind that this is not the exhaustive list of possibilities for them. There should be an awareness among parents, students and educators that these exams are highly selective and can end up excluding even the most talented and hardworking of candidates. Therefore, any rejection in these exams should not be taken as a comment on their talent or a full stop on their academic pursuits. Instead, they should consider allied fields as well by broadening their interest areas.
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