Times of
India: Chennai: Tuesday, April 01, 2014.
More than one lakh engineering seats or close to 40% of seats in Tamil Nadu went vacant in the 2013-14 academic year, most of them
from self-financing colleges, an RTI application filed by TOI has revealed.
As many as 1.03 lakh of the available 2.79 lakh seats in engineering colleges across the state went without takers.
Most of them were in self-financing colleges. Two self-financing engineering
colleges were unable to fill even one seat, and eight were unable to fill 10% of the seats. Experts said students are being more cautious about the
institution they want to join.
Former vice-chancellor of Anna University of
Technology-Chennai, C Thangaraj, said, "Early on, we did not take steps to
ensure that regulations were followed and colleges did what they wanted. We are
reaping the results now." He said basic issues like infrastructure and
teacher quality were neglected. This has affected people in rural areas the
most. "Ten years ago we were able to attract students from Kerala,
Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh. Because of the drop in quality, we are unable to
draw students now," he said.
Indian Society for Technical Education president R
Murugesan attributed the trend to more engineering colleges coming up and
existing colleges increasing seats. "This is because of the country's
policy of increasing the gross enrolment ratio in higher educational
institutions," he said.
Quantity has come at the cost of quality.
"The government has been concentrating more on increasing the number of
institutions. Now there is focus on quality. In four or five years institutions
in the country will be competing with others across the world," Murugesan
said.
.JPG)
.JPG)
