Chennai: The declining interest in engineering courses and poor enrolment of students in the last few years have forced 11 engineering colleges to close down from this academic year.
“The poor patronage of students could be one of the reasons. These colleges will not have admissions in the first year. But the second, third and fourth-year students will continue their studies in these colleges,” higher education secretary Sunil Paliwal told reporters here on Tuesday.
Totally, 527 engineering colleges and 53 B Arch colleges will take part in the engineering counselling this year. “Many engineering colleges have also opted to close their circuit branches, like IT, ECE because of poor enrollment,” he said.
The Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions Committee assigned random numbers to 1.41 lakh applicants on Tuesday. The random number will be utilised in the preparation of intersemerit where more than one candidate has got the same mark.
The merit among such candidates shall be determined in the order of priority as a percentage of marks in Maths, percentage of marks in Physics, Percentage of Mark in Fourth optional subject and Date of Birth (elder will be given preference) and Random number (high value will be given preference).
Of 1.41 lakh applicants, 88,778 are male applicants and 52,299 are female applicants. Last year 1.89 lakh seats were available in single window counselling. It is expected that around 1.80 lakh seats would be available for the counselling this year.
The counselling will start with more than 30,000 vacant seats this year.Of the applicants, 71,275 (50.52 per cent) of them are the first graduates. For sports quota 2,105 eminent sportspersons have applied for the counselling.
