THE opening up of deemed university status to standalone engineering and management colleges has enabled some institutes such as Vellore Institute of Technology to drastically increase capacity in the last two to three years. While the recent decision by the government to derecognise some of them came as a jolt, the Supreme Court’s decision to maintain status quo has resulted in most of these colleges moving further up on their growth path.

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While some of the deemed universities like Amrita  have begun to produce academic work of good quality, all of them have infrastructure of a reasonable quality. Some of these colleges like SRM have multi-location campuses while many others like VIT  boast of  a truly international student body. Most of them have student exchange programmes with different universities. What stands in good stead for the student is the assurance of a certain level of infrastructure and resource availability, though the level of teaching and learning experience vary widely. With individual admission processes and large capacities, these colleges do provide a better chance of obtaining an admission vis-à-vis some of the comparable state colleges. So  it makes sense to keep some of these colleges in your consideration set. 
 

College Profile: Vellore Institute of Technology

Location: Vellore
Chancellor: Dr. G. Viswanathan
Flagship programme: BE/BTech
Entrance exam: VITEEE (VIT Engineering Entrance Examination)
Student intake: 2,043 
Disciplines: Bioinformatics, Biomedical, Biotechnology, Information Technology, Civil, Mechanical, Energy, Automotive, Computer Science, Electrical and Electronics, Electronics and Instrumentation, Electronics and Communication 
Full-time faculty: Not Available
Fees (full course): Rs. 329,000
Board & lodging (two years): Rs. 100,000 to Rs. 188,000
Approval/Accreditation: AICTE approved, NBA and NAAC accredited 
Average placement salary: Not Available
Top recruiters: Not Available
Other programmes: MTech, MCA, MSc
Other campuses: None
Web site: www.vit.ac.in

Located in Vellore, VIT offers programmes in Science and Humanities, Engineering and Technology, Buisness Administration as well as Computer Applications.

Almost a self-contained township, the campus has adequate classrooms, hostels and other facilities that go with a first class college. The library has a video conferencing facility and also provides classroom teaching through Eklavya, EDUSAT programmes and NPTEL video courses in the different fields of education. Apart from a central library each school has seperate libraries.

Corporations have set up centres like Centre of Excellence for CISCO Advanced Networking, Red Hat Linux Competency Centre, Microsoft NET Centre etc. Regular national and international conferences/symposia and workshops are hosted on the campus.

VIT is the first educational institution in India to get international accreditations for its programmes by Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) and Energy Institute, United Kingdom, the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) of USA, ISO 9002 certificate by the DNV (Det Norske Veritas), Netherlands. Companies such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have also accredited VIT.

The institute has also developed academic partnerships with reputed universities around the world, signing more than 70 MoUs (with developed countries like USA, UK, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Australia). Faculty members from partner universities visit VIT to deliver short-term lectures. 

The Semester Abroad Programme (SAP) encourages students to complete their last semester project work at an overseas university. VIT also has a corpus of Rs. 30 lakhs to provide financial support to the needy students. VIT has started many joint/twinning programmes with options of dual degree with renowned universities in Europe and the USA. The institute has a Placement and Training Centre, which offers information, advice, guidance and support to students.