CHENNAI: Even as the total number of applicants has gone down for the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions-2019 online counselling set to begin on July 3, the reduction does not mean lower enrolment in higher education, said State Higher Education Minister KP Anbalagan. Speaking to reporters on Monday, he also announced that three new TNEA Facilitation Centres (TFC) had been opened in Chennai as more candidates opted for Chennai for certificate verification.
The total number of applicants has come down to 1.33 lakh from 1.59 lakh last year. However, the reduction in number of applicants for engineering admissions does not mean enrolment rate cut in higher education, he claimed, pointing out that there is a significant rise in the number of students applying for arts and science courses.
“Students are still joining colleges, but are currently opting for courses that are different from engineering. Tamil Nadu still has a steadily increasing enrolment in higher education,” he said while launching a 10-digit random number that will be used as a last-resort tie-breaker in the online counselling for engineering between applicants with the same score.
The applicant data for this year’s counselling show that nearly every student, who has applied for the TNEA-2019, can get admission this year as this year’s counselling begins with a vacancy of 40,000 government seats and availability of nearly 1.72 lakh seats through the online counselling. This drop has occurred as 18 colleges have stopped admissions to first year, leading to scrapping of nearly 30,000 seats.
In order to encourage students to apply for engineering courses, the Higher Education Department is striving to make engineering graduates more employable, he said. Out of the 1.72 lakh engineering seats available this year, nearly 1.43 lakh are government quota seats. The next step in the counselling process is certificate verification, which will take place at the 45 TFCs across the State from 9 am to 5 pm from June 7 to 12. The rank list will be released on June 17 and online counselling for general applicants will take place from July 3 to 28.
The government has included three new centres in Chennai, said the minister. These new centres will be situated at Anna Centenary Library, Birla planetarium and Taramani. The government will open a TFC in North Chennai too, he added. T Purushothaman, coordinator of TNEA 2019, said that the admissions committee was readying a video that would educate students on the online counselling process.
