For a student who has just passed Grade XII and is looking for a career in Information Technology, one of the biggest questions around would be whether to opt for BCA or B.Tech (CSE/IT). Though the above mentioned courses may not be really comparable on one-to-one basis, yet with the increasing demand for BCA on one side and mushrooming of engineering institutes on the other side, students may seek answers for the queries that shall help them to take a decision as far as choosing one course over the other is concerned. For this, we may have to come with a comparison between both the courses.
- Duration: B.Tech in CSE or IT shall be of 4 years duration whereas BCA course shall be of 3 years duration. For some students, it might be a case of saving 1 year in case they opt for BCA.
- Eligibility: For pursuing B.Tech, you need to have passed Grade XII with Physics and Mathematics as your core subjects along with either Chemistry or Computers. However, in case you want to pursue Bachelors in Computer Applications, you need to have passed Grade XII in any stream with some riders as far as minimum percentage is concerned. Some universities would also ask for Mathematics at Grade XII though some may not put it as a necessary condition.
In other words, a student who may have had opted for Arts or Commerce after Grade X can also opt for BCA after clearing Grade XII. However you would not be a position to pursue B.Tech with such streams at Grade XII level.
- Job Prospects: If a BCA student has acquired the skill set required by the corporate, then ideally there won’t be much difference in the job prospects whether he did pursue BCA or B.Tech (CSE/IT) at UG level.
- Scope for Masters: Scope for pursuing Masters Program in case you have already completed BCA or B.Tech is pretty much the same. After BCA, you may enroll for MCA and in case you had opted for B.Tech at UG level, you may enroll for M.Tech.
- Fee: Though not the prime concern a student should focus on, however for some it may be an important factor. In most of the cases, fee for BCA course would be less than that for a B.Tech course.
In a nutshell, BCA as well as B.Tech are quite popular among students. While B.Tech (CSE/IT) does emphasise on core programming and coding along with developing new technologies as well as mathematical skills, BCA does focus primarily on practical technologies and developing applications. In other words, B.Tech (CSE/IT) is more of developing concepts and subsequently testing them out, whereas BCA would focus on applications part of it, i.e. the study of putting of various programming concepts to use.
Generally it is believed that B.Tech offers better job opportunities than BCA, but your options also depend on the type of college you are getting to pursue your UG course. If you find a good college for BCA like Asian School of Business, Noida that does focus on experiential learning of the students to make them job ready once they are out of the campus, you would be at par or even better as compared to a B.Tech (CSE/IT) student from any other engineering college.