Education is power. It is endless. You can invest your whole life in education and at the end of life you will find a lot is still not known to you. If you are working professional, off-course you left for night colleges, open or distance mode. But if you are non-working and looking for a career after completing education, it is a very big question.
Yes, your career may get affected if you are a student and opting open courses. But don't worry, it will not affect so much.
In India, education level is increasing day by day. You can just imaging in March 2011, there were around 370 Universities, and now it is around 600. In 2 years it is almost double. UGC's 12th Planning(2012-2017) is aiming to setup more universities. A very big % of Indians are still not able to get graduation level education. More degree colleges, Institutions, and universities are required. You may wonder to know that just 7% Indian gets graduated. You can think about more higher education like Masters & PhD!!!
Seeing our university age-group population, you can just imaging that around 10,000 scholars were able to get IITs umbrella rest goes into different peek engineering colleges. Recently government has spread IITs and marked our nation premier institutions/ colleges as IIT to provide high quality of education. But, do you think, this figure is enough to tackle the big technologies demands. No, it can cover. In IT, there is no barrier. You can find everywhere Art, Commerce & simple science(not CS) graduates in software development industry. The demand is huge. BITS( top 20 science & technology schools in Asia) has started Industry Integrated courses to fill the gap and providing BS & MS degrees. As long you are updating yourself with new trends you are fit. There are around 1600 engineering colleges with total intake of around 7-8 Lac only ! Engineering colleges are facing shortage of faculty as every one is gong in other industry than education.
You might be thinking that then what is the problem? Well, let me explain it in simpler way. Do all students get place in IITs/IIMs? No. Why? Because these institutions has setup some rules. They are strict who can join them.
Like this, there are some big companies who has tendency to hire only engineering graduates(BE/BTech/BArch). Some goes more than this and have fixed % creteria also. Some goes more ahead have no educational gap and etc etc.
There are still big and good companies who don't care about all these. They hire engineers and look for engineer minds.
In some countries, open education is seen with good eyes. In India, due to some money maker persons that are establishing private state universities for business are making its reputation down. You can find many private state universities who can sell you degrees in very marginal amount. This all is happening because careless governing body of UGC & AICTE. Even DEC is not so active. In 2010, 44 deemed universities were de-recognized by Govt of India as they were violating rules. We have also seen that honorable the Supreme court of India's has ordered to close about hundred Chhatisgarh's universities at a time. There are very good universities who run their courses in decent and strict manner. IGNOU is one of them. IGNOU is the national open university. Its MCA course is recognized by AICTE.
So, there is no need to worry about your distance mode or open mode education. If you working professional, you can opt for Industry Integrated courses (China works on it) from BITS, open courses from IGNOU.
Please note the following point while going for distance/open mode education in India -
- Engineering courses(BTech/BE) are invalid in distance/open mode(non-regular) .
- MCA is technical course and it requires AICTE recognition.
- Also asp per BCI ( a governing body for Law education) LLB, LLM is invalid in non-regular mode.
- The same rule has been enforced by MCI for medical courses like MBBS etc.
- There are many universities who get recognition from DEC for a particular period and particular courses only. But they start offering many degree courses. Here you need to check DEC website to know for which course DEC has given permission.
- These are private state universities and they are not authorize to open franchise or study center outside their territory( in thier establish state). But you may find many universities who are outside their state and having many centers through out the nation. Please be far from these. Any day supreme court derecognize them and theirs sold degrees will stand invalid automatically. Some private universities even not recognized by DEC for short term courses too, are having their centers in the whole nation and provide you regular courses making Industry Integrated courses. They are focus on making money rather that quality education.
Post Extended On : 01-Dec-2013
UGC has been given the regulatory charges for Distance Education in India after dissolving the DEC. In October, UGC come with structured system and model for controlling / regulating distance education system in nation. The new banner is called Distance Education Bureau (DEB). Its home page is : http://www.ugc.ac.in/deb/
To understand the Distance Education (What is it? Why ? and How?), please refer - http://www.ugc.ac.in/deb/pdf/ODLwhatwhyandhow.pdf