The long delay in beginning engineering admissions this year due to the logjam over fee hike and fee reimbursement issue seems to have taken a heavy toll on engineering colleges in the state. Around two lakh out of a total of 3.40 lakh engineering seats in the state might remain vacant after the admissions process concludes this month, say sources.
As many as 72,733 students who qualified in the Eamcet have skipped the on-going counselling. Most of them, experts say, have taken admission in engineering colleges in other states. While a total of 2,07,473 candidates were called for certificate verification, only 1,34,740 turned up when the process concluded on Thursday. The seat list will be announced on September 14 and classes will commence from September 17.
Around 1 lakh tech seats to go vacant
With 2,25,645 engineering seats on offer for Eamcet counselling, there’s already a vacancy of 90,905 seats, assuming that all the students who turned up for counselling take the seats. Officials expect nearly one lakh seats to go vacant in the counselling alone, since usually another 10,000 students cancel their seats for various reasons after the seat allotment. Besides this, there are another one lakh seats available in the management quota, of which only 10,000 seats in top colleges are expected to find takers.
Last year, the counselling had concluded in August and classes had started from August 17. This year, there was no clarity on when the counselling would begin till August-end. This forced a large number of students to migrate to other states. Though there is a delay of only a month in commencement of classes this year over last year, what created panic among students and parents were the series of cases filed in the High Court and the Supreme Court by the government and the college managements over the fee hike, leading to doubts whether admissions would be held at all this year.