Chennai: Fewer students seem to have preferred to continue higher education in the engineering stream (M.E./M.Tech) this year.
According to details provided by Anna University, of the 20,618 seats available in M.E./M.Tech (non-Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering category) only 5,377 students had joined the course, leaving 15,241 seats vacant with only two days remaining for the counselling to end. In the GATE category, over 50 per cent of the seats remained vacant this year. Of a total of 1,186 seats available for GATE candidates, 569 are vacant this year.
Educationist and career counsellor Jayaprakash A. Gandhi said that fewer students from Tamil Nadu take up GATE in engineering, which reflects in Tamil Nadu Common Admissions.
“With improvement in employment scenario in the country, top scoring students in the non-GATE category don’t opt to do post-graduation as companies mostly prefer under-graduates rather than post-graduates,” he said.
R.Vivek, an engineering student, pointed out that it was only those, who want to pursue teaching or research as their career option, would do M.E. or M.Tech. “In today’s scenario if one has to become a faculty they also need to do Ph.D, which takes at least five years to complete, so after seven years only he can earn. This keeps students away from pursuing post-graduation in engineering rather a few do MBA as they could migrate from the shop floor to the managerial cadre,” he said.
