48 per cent seats go vacant in single window counselling

Of the 1,93,093 seats available for academic stream, about 48 per cent went vacant. The percentage of absentees has also come down to 31.3 per cent this year from 36 per cent last year.

Anna University had 5,000 more students for counselling this year. This turned out to be a positive sign when several students are looking at arts & science as their career option. About 19,500 seats in scheduled caste category and 1,600 in scheduled tribe went vacant this year.

Prof V. Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary for Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission (TNEA) said they expect 5,000 more students to get admitted through vocational and supplementary counselling.

Eminent academician and career counsellor Jayaprakash A. Gandhi said that compared to last year fewer students joined engineering in Tamil medium and over 100 private engineering colleges attracted less than 50 students.

The university called 1,48,794 students for counselling of which 1,01,620 students got admitted, 46,571 (31.3 per cent) abstained, 603 skipped without taking any seat.

As like last year, mechanical engineering (25,355) turned out to be the most sought after course, followed by electronics and communication engineering.

All 29 seats in handloom & technology course in the newly started Indian Institute of Handloom Technology, Salem got filled.

This year, a few courses like food technology, geo-informatics, industrial bio-technology, leather technology, mining engineering, manufacturing engineering, metallurgical engineering and plastic technology almost got filled.

Interestingly this year no college had even one seat vacant, all seats in government and its aided colleges got filled up. Gandhi said that as students wanted a change in career option, they chose courses like food technology.

Number of students taking up civil engineering dropped considerably, however preference for computer engineering and electrical & electronics engineering went up this year, he said.