Top management commitment and overall engineering education excellence

Purpose – There has been an exponential proliferation of higher engineering educational institutions in India. The purpose of this paper is to seek to investigate students' perceptions of the level of Commitment of Top Management and Leadership (CTML) and Education Service Design and Delivery (ESDD) in Government Run Engineering Colleges (GREC), Privately Funded Engineering Colleges (PFEC) and Privately Funded Deemed Universities (PFDU) in India. The paper also strives to find out the significant predictors of Overall Engineering Education Excellence (OEEE).Design/methodology/approach – A conceptual model has been developed linking Total Quality Management (TQM) elements and OEEE. The data were obtained from a survey of 992 students of higher engineering institutions in South India and analyzed using SPSS.Findings – Significant differences among GREC, PFEC and PFDU were noticed in several TQM dimensions under study, and also in OEEE. The findings show correlation between the seven TQM variables and OEEE. ...