CHENNAI: A mere 3,101 of the total 19,677 post-graduate engineering seats have been filled in common admission counselling by Anna University in Tamil Nadu, which ended last week. This means a whopping 84 per cent of seats in courses like ME, M Tech and M Arch have no takers and most of the vacant seats are in private engineering colleges that have mushroomed across the state. It is learnt that the trend has been so at least for the past five years and people in the know attribute this to decline in the recruitment of teaching faculty by private engineering colleges.
Also, there are very few alternative avenues for engineering post graduates. “The numbers were almost the same previous year too. We will surrender the vacant seats to private colleges and they are free to fill the seats themselves,” says J Indumathi, secretary of Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission. Similar to BE admissions, the common counselling for ME and MTech seats were conducted for 65 per cent of the seats that private colleges surrender towards government quota. Counselling was conducted through single-window system.
While seats in most of the government engineering colleges and well-known private colleges were filled, those in many private colleges had no takers. E Balagurusamy, former vice-chancellor of Anna University, said post graduation in engineering is mostly pursued by those interested in taking lectureship in colleges. As lesser and lesser students are taking BE courses, private colleges have also reduced the recruitment of lecturers.