The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Supreme Court ruling gives a new spin to professional courses admission

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Aug 14, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Supreme Court ruling gives a new spin to professional courses admission

Vani Doraisamy

Leaves a host of questions unanswered in its wake

CHENNAI: The year 2005 may well be the end of the present pattern of professional courses admissions in Tamil Nadu. Beginning next year, the scene changes radically, thanks to the Supreme Court ruling giving unaided institutions complete rights over admissions and the State Government promising a revamped umbrella admission policy.

The State will now have to frame a policy in accordance with the ruling which does not spell out specific mechanisms for transparency in self-financing college admissions or in checking `profiteering' by such institutions. So the question that warrants an answer is: if the 70,000 seats from self-financing institutions are removed from Anna University's seat matrix next year, how does one balance the skewed seats-students ratio?

More seats than students

As evident from the engineering admissions scenario this year (of the 25,123 seats that remained vacant till Friday, 24,978 were in self-financing institutions), there are more seats than eligible students in unaided institutions.

If these are taken out of the government's single window admissions next year, quite a few thousand seats may remain vacant, unless the eligibility criterion is lowered vis-à-vis the Plus Two marks.

The Consortium of Self-Financing Professional, Arts and Science Colleges has already pleaded for fixing a mere pass in Plus Two as the eligibility, a request likely to find favour with a committee formed by the self-financing institutions to monitor admissions. What then would happen to the apex court's insistence on admissions based only on merit?

Also, as Salem-based educational consultant Jayaprakash Gandhi points out, if the self-financing institutions ratify admissions based on an all-India entrance examination and the State Government's forthcoming admission policy decides to stick to a State-level entrance test for government and aided colleges, would that not pull students in opposite directions?

Mr. Gandhi points to another conundrum: only around 4,850 seats from Anna University's constituent colleges, government and government aided colleges would be available for the government's single window counselling from next year based on the rule of reservation, and the 70,000 seats in private colleges would be filled under a separate system that follows no rule of reservation.

This effectively shuts out any avenue for a large chunk of MBC, SC and ST students.

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