With a week left for the government’s single window counselling for engineering colleges in the state end, about 1.12 lakh students (academic, vocational, sports category and physically challenged quota) have enrolled till Tuesday compared to 78,233 students at the end of counselling in 2008. Seven self-financing engineering colleges, meanwhile, were able to fill less than 10 seats this year.
Statistics provided by Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) show 1,25,341 students had applied for 85,560 seats of whom 78,233 had enrolled in Engineering course in 2008, in 2011 the intake rose to 1,54,260 with 1,47,564 students applying for seats. However, this year 1,80,071 students applied for 1,82,323 seats with about 1.12 lakh candidates preferring Engineering till Tuesday.
Speaking to this newspaper, Prof. V. Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary, TNEA said that this year’s counselling had several interesting trends, including increase in intake, colleges, students applied, allotted and vacant seats.
“About 1.12 lakh students got admissions till Tuesday which is a record number compared to admissions from 2008 to 2012. We still have a week to go for counselling to end so we expect about 55,000 seats to go vacant,” he said.
Attributing the increase in the number of private engineering colleges as the main reason for the rise in vacant seats, the TNEA secretary said that there was no big difference in the number of candidates who applied this year and last year.
Students seemed to prefer the course rather than the college which they joined Prof. Uthariaraj said, adding that Mechanical Engineering (25,391 students) had turned out to be the most sought-after course, followed by Electronics and Communication Engineering (24,500).