It is another year of low for engineering admissions in the State as the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission’s single window counselling will begin with 16,508 unfilled seats. According to All India Council for Technical Education the number of seats in the State had been reduced this year.
An official said the most number of reduction was in Information Technology and Computer Science courses. But the principal of a college said more students preferred ECE, CSE and IT branches even in the management category.
The introduction of NEET for medical admission had pushed up the demand for courses like chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, according to the principal of another college. “These students would have scored low in NEET but have good scores in Class 12 and would be eligible for engineering,” the principal said.
According to S. Kuppuswami, principal of Kongu Engineering College, variations were part of engineering courses as choice depended on demand.
“This kind of scenario existed even 45 years ago. In my senior batch, there were only four students in civil engineering in the College of Engineering, Guindy, whereas in my batch there were 80 students.”
Engineering educators estimate that 1.25 lakh seats could remain vacant this year as the Central government funds for postmatric scholarship had been halved and also due to addition of Annamalai University’s engineering seats to TNEA counselling.
This year, the State government has added 720 more seats in Anna University’s departments and 16 constituent colleges. There is no guarantee that all the 9,110 seats in the university will be filled. Last year, according to the data, of the 8,560 seats sanctioned in these institutions only 6,763 seats had been filled.