Engineering loses its shine? Private Engineering Colleges see low or no enrolment figures

New Delhi, July 30: Private engineering colleges have faced a big fall in terms of the enrolment this year. According to the media reports, many colleges of West Bengal failed to fill more than 70 percent of seats this year while in Chennai, approximately one-third of the toppers did not attend B.Tech counselling of Anna University. Another shocking media report threw light on the condition of UPSEE counselling where more than 176 colleges failed to grab even a single seat taker.

The reasons for such a deteriorating condition of private engineering colleges might be the poor placement records, bad condition of the infrastructure, lack of good faculty or quality education in engineering colleges. Private institutes in other states like Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Punjab and Rajasthan are also fighting the battle of low enrolment. In UP not only 176 colleges failed to fill their single seat but the condition of the remaining colleges was no better.

AICTE has revised some of the operational guidelines for colleges in the past year where in if a college has 50 seats for IT course and more than 70 percent of seats remain vacant then the capacity must be reduced to half. Then, even after the reduction in capacity, if the college fails to fill the seats then the management of the college is required to take permission from AICTE to close it down.

Now it has to be seen that how AICTE will manage to implement the ways to improve the condition of seat filling in the engineering colleges. The engineering colleges themselves are also required to introspect about what they need to do to attract the students to take admissions.