Exodus worry: Telangana students give local varsities a miss

HYDERABAD: Ditching local universities, thousands of students from Telangana are now making a beeline for private and deemed universities in other parts of India, seeking better education and employment. Their top picks: SRM Institute of Science and Technology (SRM), Chennai, Lovely Professional University (LPU), Jalandhar and Vellore Institute of Technology, Chennai and KL University, Guntur to name a few.
Sample this: SRM that attracts about 3,000 students from Telangana every year had as many as 12,636 students from Telangana, take the entrance test this year– the fourth highest in the country. At 21,002, Andhra Pradesh had the highest number of students appear for the SRM Joint Entrance Examination for Engineering.

The reasons, educationalists say are plenty. The provision for niche courses, higher quality of teaching staff and better placement opportunities are the most common factors. That they have to shell out a slightly higher fee isn’t a deterrent.
Not surprisingly then, despite SRM’s fee hovering around Rs 3.75 lakhs, the college saw nearly 4,000 students from Telangana seek admission in engineering in the last academic year. The fee even in Hyderabad’s top-notch institutes is just about Rs 1.30 lakhs.
“Students from Telangana and AP constitute nearly 25% of the total admissions every year. We offer specialized BTech courses in cyber security, aerospace, big data, cloud computing which are not offered by the local institutions. Hence, many students prefer SRM over them,” said TV Gopal, director, admissions, SRM Institute of Science and Technology.
LPU in Punjab too has observed an influx of students from Telangana– from 500 in 2016 to 840 in 2019 . “Lucrative scholarships made available to the students provides an opportunity to all to pursue desired degrees regardless of their financial backgrounds,” said Rajeev Sobti, admissions head at LPU. The university offers scholarship up to Rs 50,000 per semester to those qualifying the cut-off marks for each category.
Back home, close to 17,000 engineering seats and over two lakh degree seats did not have any takers during academic year 2018-19. “There are limited number of computer science engineering seats in Telangana. Therefore, rankers who fail to secure a CSE seat in Hyderabad have a tendency to seek admission in private/deemed universities in other cities where there is no cap on number of seats,” said Srini Bupalam, vice-president of All India Federation of Self Financing Technical Institutions.