The Hindu : Tamil Nadu News : Vacancy fear haunts managements

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Aug 19, 2004

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu

Vacancy fear haunts managements

By K. Ramachandran

CHENNAI, AUG. 18. The trends in B.E/B.Tech admissions and the continuing uncertainty over management quota seats in self-financing colleges are causing apprehension among managements. Their fear: thousands of seats will go vacant this year too as it happened in the past three years.

Tamil Nadu has about 72,000 seats in nearly 240 engineering colleges. Of these, 42,000 are being filled as `government quota' through the single-window system (SWS) of counselling. This year the other 30,000 seats are sought to be filled by the managements themselves.

A majority of the 227 unaided colleges joined to conduct a common entrance test (CET) under the supervision of the Justice S.S. Subramani Committee. Over two dozen leading colleges, however, decided to use the marks secured by candidates in the Tamil Nadu Professional Courses Entrance Examinations (TNPCEE) to shortlist them for the management quota also (as is done for single-window admissions).

The committee insisted that the management quota be also filled under a single-window system using a single merit list comprising all eligible candidates. The managements dissented and the matter is before the Madras High Court, which has reserved orders.

Open secret

It is an open secret that thousands of students have `booked' seats in colleges based on their TNPCEE scores and Plus-Two marks. The court order will decide their careers. Students look forward to the outcome, hoping for a hassle-free entry into the engineering courses.

The official argument in favour of an SWS for the management quota seats also is that the Supreme Court has repeatedly highlighted the need for deciding inter se merit of all eligible applicants. This is possible only by keeping a single merit list and following the single-window system.

However, management representatives and counsellors say most of the students who wrote the CET or those who have booked seats under the management quota are attending the SWS counselling at Anna University here.

"In 10 days of counselling, such students are looking for seats in other colleges also and in case they find a better branch or college (from their viewpoint), they will shift. Also, discerning candidates are choosing colleges/seats based on the Anna University examination results in the last one or two semesters and opting for institutions with a better record in academic and non-academic activities... All this means thousands of seats in the SWS pool as well as in the management quota will fall vacant," notes a college chairman from Kancheepuram.

Performance criterion

The admission trends show that most of the seats in highly rated colleges are filled up. Now students prefer any branch in colleges with a good academic record. However, they are shunning even popular branches in 50-60 colleges. A Salem-based consultant, Jayaprakash Gandhi, says poor students with a score of 220 or 225 will not prefer less than average colleges. Some of them opt for a college during counselling but do not join the institution, as they cannot afford the fees.

All these may translate into 25,000 vacant seats, with three dozen colleges deep in the red, says the head of an educational trust at Ambattur here. Even long-standing institutions will face a financial crunch.

Managements point out that in 2002, over 14,000 seats went vacant because that year the All-India Council for Technical Education approved more than 60 new colleges. Last year, about 25,000 seats remained vacant. A dozen unaided colleges had an intake fewer than 10 students each. This trend could be directly correlated to the academic performance of the colleges.

Mr. Gandhi says even if the issue of management seats is resolved now, it will take one month for the colleges to formally complete admissions and the academic schedule will suffer. "Even now one does not understand the need for a separate CET or another SWS, as there is no difference between the government and management quota seats in terms of fees, reservation or any other parameter. Even months ago, the Government could have asked the colleges to surrender all seats to the SWS. At least the students and parents would have been saved a lot of confusion."

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