CHENNAI: Aiming to bring down the vacant seats in the engineering colleges, the All India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) has decided to not to give fresh approval for the engineering courses that have less than 30 per cent admissions of the approved intake for five years in a row.
The council has released approval process handbook for the year 2017-18. Among the new set of rules introduced for approval of institutions in 2017-18, one of the prominent rule is the non-approval of courses that have had the poor intake in the last five years.
“Institutions having courses where the admission is less than 30 per cent of “approved intake” for the last 5 years consistently and if it continues for the current academic year, such courses shall be closed next year with the approval of the council,” the council has stated in the handbook.
Career consultant and educationist Jayaprakash A. Gandhi said, “This new rule will affect about 40 engineering colleges in the state. At these colleges, they never had admission for several years in many branches. Only in mechanical and computer science branches, they managed to get some admissions.”
Even some of the top colleges wanted to shut down the secondary courses like automobile engineering and production engineering for lack of interest among the students.
“AICTE should not encourage even the top colleges to start secondary courses like petrochemical engineering. Even in abroad the specialised courses are available only at the PG level. The companies only prefer the core engineering branches at the UG level. These students are getting discriminated in the exams like GATE. So, AICTE themselves should not allow these courses,” he added.
A private college principal speaking on condition of anonymity has welcomed this move. He said it will not affect the major engineering colleges. This move will also help bring better quality to engineering education.
