'Value-Added' Indicator for Indirect Assessment of Productivity in an Engineering College

Academic institutions in the tertiary sector imparting education in the engineering field are encountering a variety of challenges in attracting resources, students and faculty. The difficulty lies in attracting not only sufficient number of eligible students, but the best quality students. Students and their parents have their own way of ranking educational institutions based on published literature, articles and surveys conducted by different agencies. One of the indirect measures related to reputation and productivity of a college is the value-addition that a student gets while s/he studies for obtaining a degree. In other words, the placement records of an institution and the average salary package obtained by the students passing out, can indicate this value-addition. This paper attempts to examine the 'value-added' concept as a measure for assessing the productivity of education imparted in an engineering college. Computations of value-added index based on (a) future earning estimates of students passing out; (b) operating costs of the college and (c) branch of study (whether IT or non-IT) are computed for a batch of students