Wednesday, July 14, 2010
More students turn up after fee waiver offer by government

Chennai: Trends in the first nine days of the single window counselling of the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA 2010) have thrown up an interesting aspect — the number of candidates absenting themselves has come down compared to the previous year. “Right from day one of the counselling for academic stream candidates which commenced on July 5, the number of students who failed to turn up for the counselling is fewer compared to the absenteeism rate registered in 2009,” TNEA secretary V Rhymend Uthariaraj told The Times of India on Tuesday.

Last year on the opening day, as many as 29.59% of the candidates who were called for the counselling were absent.

However, this year on the first day the absenteeism rate among aspirants was comparatively less at 25.95%.

Admission authorities usually send out call letters to more number of aspirants anticipating that a percentage of candidates would fail to turn up for the counselling. “As of July 13 (Tuesday) we had called 23,950 academic stream candidates for the counselling. However, 3,948 of them who constitute 16.48% of the total candidates called were absent. Besides, 80 aspirants who turned up for the counselling returned home without picking a BE/BTech seat. The candidature of one aspirant was rejected,” professor Uthariaraj said.

In contrast, last year on the first nine days as many as 4,641 candidates who were issued call letters failed to attend counselling.

“One reason why more students are attending the counselling and joining engineering colleges this year could be the waiver in tuition fee offered by the state government to first generation professional course learners. This would have attracted candidates from poorer sections who cannot otherwise afford engineering education,” a senior professor at the Anna University said.

Indications are that if this trend of lower absentees continues in the coming days, then the authorities might rework the number of call letters to be issued to candidates on a daily basis.

Meanwhile, the Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) branch continues to remain the favourite of BE aspirants with as many as 4,974 seats being filled up so far in the general counselling alone.

While Mechanical Engineering is the second most preferred course with 3,087 candidates choosing the course, Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) is in the third place in the list of priority with 2,995 seats being filled.

Information Technology (IT), which was the most sought after course a couple of years ago, has been pushed to the fifth slot with 1,869 seats being taken and Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) is in the fourth place with as many as 2,458 students joining the branch so far.