As many as 55,444 seats (44.7%) of the over 1.23 lakh in the first-year engineering courses across the state remained vacant at the end of the Centralised Admission Process for the academic year 2020-21. Last year, of 1.28 lakh seats in engineering colleges, 62,086 (49%) were vacant.
Only 6% seats were vacant in pharmacy this year and 32% in management degree programmes, data released by the state Common Entrance Test Cell indicated.
DV Jadhav, joint director of Directorate of Technical Education for Pune region, said, “Students have been preferring computer science and information technology streams over others. Most companies are placing students who have sound software skills and this means fewer students are choosing core streams like mechanical or civil engineering.”
Amol Suryavanshi, who teaches at the mechanical engineering department of an engineering college, said students’ preferences keep changing every few years.
“In a few years, the automobile industry will pick up and with so much talk about electric vehicles and EV giants like Tesla’s entry into India, there will be a market for mechanical students soon. But, such students should know basic programming language and basic electronics. The future is about multidisciplinary engineers,” Suryavanshi said.
Kuldip Charak, director of faculty of management, MBA & MCA, Navsahyadri Group of Institutes, said the high vacancies are due to the delay at the start of the admission process in the state.
“Many states and even deemed universities within Maharashtra had completed admissions before ours began. Admissions in rural and semi-rural belts have been fewer than last year. The process of admission was cumbersome for students. The state should have accepted the All-India Council for Technical Education’s notification which permitted admissions to management institutes without CET based on last year’s graduation marks when many students were unable to appear for various CETs,” he added.
Ramdas Zol, president, Association of Management of Unaided Institutes in Rural Areas, said this is a good time for pharmacy education as there were 7,000 more applications this year compared to last year. “The entire talk around Covid vaccination has led to students thinking of careers in pharmaceuticals. Even IT companies are recruiting students from pharmacy...” Zol added.