Engineering courses seats may go vacant in Tamil Nadu

Like last year, around 60,000 engineering seats may go vacant in Tamil Nadu because at least 35,000 students are expected to drop out of the race for engineering seats even before the admission process begins.

Anna University's engineering admissions gets massive response from the students in Tamil Nadu. A total of 2.35 lakh applications were sold for engineering courses admissions.

Anna University, Chennai provides admissions to the first year B. E. / B. Tech. Degree Courses to the University Departments / University Colleges, Government and Government Aided Engineering Colleges and for the seats surrendered by the Self - Financing Engineering Colleges in the State.

University officials expect at least 2 lakh seats to be made available for admission through the single window counselling system as government quota seats this year.

Experts expect some of the thousands Engg seats to go vacant this year. "Every year the absentee rate in a single window counselling is around 28%. If it is the same this year too, around 68,000 seats are likely to go vacant," said educational consultant P Moorthy Selvakumaran.

Second and third grade colleges are expected to go without any takers as students prefer science courses to engineering for the prospective job opportunities. Every student has an opportunity to get a seat in an engineering college in the state.

Eminent academician Jayaprakash A. Gandhi opened that the craze for engineering courses had taken a beating with only a few IT firms recruiting students on campus. "One can expect over 60,000 seats to go vacant this year. Colleges with quality infrastructure and teaching faculty record will survive," he said. Further, he noted that students have realised that science courses could also throw up good job opportunities at present.

The number of those who have applied for medical courses, too, seems to have taken a hit. By Monday evening, the directorate of medical education (DME) sold 32,052 applications, apart from those downloaded from the website.

So far, the DME has received around 18,000 applications. The last date for submission of applications for MBBS and BDS seats is May 20. Selection committee secretary RG Sukumar said 5,000 more may be added to the count, taking the tally to 23,000.

The Directorate of Medical Education (DME) looks after the admission process to fill in the 2,145 seats available in 18 government medical colleges and 11 private colleges in the state of which 838 seats are from government quota.