CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) this year has recorded the highest uptake of seats, at least, compared to the last five years, with over 75% of the total available seats taken after the third and final round of general counselling, as per the data released by TNEA on Wednesday.
This is an increase of nearly 10 percentage points compared to the 66.39% seats taken last year at this stage. The increase in uptake is in spite of the total number of seats going up by nearly 10,000 this year. Of the 1,72,589 seats available in 423 colleges this year, 1,30,077 (75.36%) have been taken.
However, despite the encouraging enrolment figures, over 40,000 seats are still remaining vacant. With only supplementary counselling and the counselling for unfilled seats from SCs (Arunthathiyars - SCA) after moving them to the remaining SC pool, the number of seats filled is not expected to significantly go up further.
“The number of vacant seats has dropped to 42,512 this year from 54,587 last year. Tamil Nadu is one of the states with the highest number of engineering seats. Hence, it is obvious that seats will remain vacant,” said Jayprakash Gandhi, career consultant, who has been tracking TNEA for over a decade.
Importantly, a key highlight this year is that core engineering courses seem to have regained their glory.
College-wise data also painted an encouraging picture. This year, 39 colleges managed to fill 100% of their available seats, a notable jump from 29 last year. Out of these, 17 were self-financing institutions. Furthermore, 292 colleges had filled more than 50% of their seats, of which 205 filled over 80%, 166 crossed 90%, and 118 crossed 95%.
However, there are 32 colleges where less than 10% of the seats are filled. Even more alarming, 19 of these colleges had single-digit admissions. Three failed to attract even a single student.
In the third round, 50,093 students were allotted seats. This included 2,991 who were allotted colleges in the previous rounds.