CHENNAI: Tamil Nadu Engineering Admission (TNEA) counselling for general category students will begin from Monday, as per the Directorate of Technical Education (DTE).
If experts are to be believed, courses related to electronics engineering are likely to be the first choice of students this year.
Academicians and career counsellors said trends indicate an uptick in demand for Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) and Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) due to slowdown in the IT sector and booming semiconductor industry in the country.
“During career counselling events, enquiries related to ECE courses have increased manifold. Students were interested to know about the career opportunities the course offers,” said career counsellor, Jayprakash Gandhi.
Private engineering colleges also witnessed a surge in admissions in ECE courses during management quota admissions. “Out of the total seats, 65% of the seats are for TNEA counselling and the remaining 35% is filled through management quota. All our ECE seats under management quota are filled this year,” said principal of a private engineering college in Chennai.
To cater to the demand, six colleges have also added 1,000 more seats in the stream this year. “The demand for ECE is more compared to previous years. We have added 120 seats, 60 each in two of our colleges,” said R M Kishore, vice-chairman of RMK group of institutions. He added that significant investments in the semiconductor industry are creating a strong demand for skilled professionals. Colleges have started specialised courses like electronics and communication and electronics engineering (VLSI design and technology) to meet the industry needs. As per DTE, this year a total of 1.72 lakh seats (over 13,000 seats more than last year) will be available in 417 colleges for students to choose from, during counselling. The demand for Artificial Intelligence (AI) still continues as over 3,500 seats in AI and Data Science streams have increased this year. In the first round, out of the three rounds of the counselling session, 39,145 students may participate, and students securing cut-off between 200 and 179 marks will fill their choices.
“Students have realised that due to the rat race to join computer science-related courses, soon the market will be flooded with only these engineers, while there will be a huge scarcity of core engineers,” said K Natarajan, a mechanical engineering faculty in a private college.