Chennai: Of 509 engineering colleges, 239 colleges (47 per cent) have filled only less than 30 per cent seats making it very difficult for them to survive and provide quality engineering education to the students.
The five rounds of online engineering counselling concluded on Monday. Of 1,70,628 seats available for the general counselling 72,648 seats alone were filled Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission’s online counselling and 97,890 seats remain vacant.
In total, 74,601 seats were filled this year a decrease of 11,754 seats compared to last year. This year 22 engineering colleges could not fill a single seat and nine colleges filled only one seat in the counselling. “It is very disappointing to see that only 136 engineering colleges could fill more than 50% of their intake and 81 colleges could not even fill up their 10 per cent of intake,” said career consultant Jayaprakash A. Gandhi.
The colleges could not even fill up the 50 per cent of their intake will struggle for the survival. “We need at least 60 per cent intake to manage the present faculty members and facilities. It is impossible to run the college with less than 30 per cent intake,” a private college principal said.
The colleges did not expect the steep fall in the admissions this year. “The admissions were down by nearly 12,000 seats compared to the last year. So, even some of the good colleges also could not fill more than 50 per cent seats,” a private college principal said.
The government has announced it would reimburse the fee for SC category students only if they were admitted through engineering counselling. “The SC category students joined only in top 100 colleges. Rest of the colleges got students in very little numbers making the survival of over two hundred colleges even more difficult,” another principal explained.
He said the bottom 200 colleges have accounted for only a few thousand students. Course wise, the demand for computer science and IT streams has gone up while the mechanical and civil engineering courses have witnessed a sharp decline in the interest due to the very low campus placements in the previous years.
Many of the top 50 colleges also could not fill up their civil and mechanical branches this year. “However, the students in the fifth round chose to go by the college and selected the mechanical branch in top colleges,” Jayaprakash Gandhi observed.
Educational consultant D.Nedunchezhiyan urged the Anna University to come up with a road map for the students who have joined the colleges which have low enrollment and to revive the engineering education.
“These colleges could not even pay their faculty members and could not maintain their infrastructure and should not have been allowed to participate in the counselling,” he said.
