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At the end of general counselling for admission into engineering courses on Thursday, 1.04 lakh students were allotted seats in over 500 colleges and exactly 45,062 seats fell vacant.

Compared to last year when 1.12 lakh students joined engineering education in the academic stream, the drop of 8,000 this year could check the craze for starting about 50 new engineering colleges in the State every year. Compared to last year, the number of available seats went up from 1.20 lakh to 1.49 lakh this year that explains the increase in vacant seats. Only 1.40 had applied for TNEA 2011.

Talking to reporters, Mannar Jawahar, vice-chancellor, Anna University, said that while all the seats were filled in 26 engineering colleges, only 10 per cent of seats got filled up in 24 colleges. In one particular college, not even a single student has joined, he said, unwilling to disclose the name of the college.

While not even a single seat was vacant in government and aided colleges, there were 610 vacant seats in constituent colleges of Anna Universities of Technology. About 60 per cent of seats were filled in Tamil medium stream of civil and mechanical engineering courses.

According to TNEA 2011 statistics, the number of seats that fell vacant in different engineering disciplines is as follows: Aeronautical – 886; automobile – 786; biotechnology – 348; civil – 5,325; computer science – 9,262; electronics and communication– 7,944; electrical and electronics – 8,758; electronics and instrumentation – 742; information technology – 6,265 and mechanical engineering – 2,903.

“This year the preference of students has been for colleges than courses. About 8,000 additional seats were sanctioned in existing colleges which were picked up by students,” says Rhymend Uthariaraj, secretary, TNEA 2011. Another 3,000 seats are expected to be filled up in the supplementary counselling on Friday and final phase of vocational counselling on August 16 and 17, he adds.

The community profile of the engineering students this year is OC – 39,810; BC – 26,882; MBC – 19,627; SC – 12,778; BCM – 3,199; SCA – 1,472; ST – 344, FOC - 41. Of the allotted, first generation graduates were 62,749, those who studied in Tamil medium in higher secondary were 48,153, students from rural and urban background were 71,229 and 32,924 respectively. On the final day of counselling, 3,276 students were called for counselling and only 1,918 were allotted seats with 41.03 per cent of students failing to turn up. The overall absentee rate stood at 25.64 per cent.

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