Circuit branches continue to attract engineering aspirants. In the first round of allotment under the single window counselling of the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission 2020, the results of which were released on Friday, 62.8% of the seats allotted were for Computer Science and Engineering, ECE, EEE, and Information Technology.
Of the 12,500 students who had been called for counselling, the cut-off for which ended at 175 marks, 7,510 seats had been allotted. The College of Engineering, Guindy, led the table with 928 seats being filled, whereas 294 colleges did not fill even one seat.
While Anna University and some top-rung colleges such as SSN, PSG and Thiagarajar College of Engineering have steered clear of new courses, others have launched niche courses in Artificial Intelligence, Data Science and Machine Learning. These courses have had good response. Aspirants have been attracted to two new courses — Artificial Intelligence and Data Science and Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning — in which 2.2% of the seats have been allotted.
Colleges that have started the new courses are upbeat. A. Ramesh, principal of the Chennai Institute of Technology, said it had tied up with IT companies to train students. “We have recruited faculty who have completed Ph.D in AI and we have tied up with a few companies that will provide us adjunct faculty to provide online classes. The students will have practical exposure, and that is possible only if they have industrial experience,” he said.
R.M. Kishore of RMK Group of Institutions, which has also started the Artificial Intelligence and Data Science programme, said it had tied up with three IT companies: TCS, Cognizant and Virtusa. Since these companies are expected to recruit students from the college in the next three-four years, they have provided the syllabus for the programme, he said.
Though the admission pattern is the same as last year, Jayaprakash Gandhi, an independent education consultant, said almost 2,500 candidates did not pay the initial deposit. Among the self-financing colleges, SSN had done better than PSG and Thiagarajar College, he said. Colleges that filled only a small number of seats they had surrendered to the government said they expected to do well.
“Unlike last year, the number of those opting for engineering is higher this year. Students were willing to pay a high capitation fee in some colleges in the Coimbatore belt,” said a professor of a self-financing college in the city. “We expect the admission to pick up in the next two rounds,” he said.
Senior professors in top-rung institutions, including Anna University, are worried by the delay in counselling for medicine.
Almost all top-rung colleges will see seats lapse once medical counselling begins. Professors anticipate 500 seats falling vacant at Anna University alone.