Final admission round over,39,000 engineering seats still vacant,says DTE

“There’s no doubt that the opening of new colleges has contributed to the increase in number of seats. At present,number of seats in the state are exceeding the demand for them. Also the dismal placement records in many colleges has led to fewer students going for these courses,” said Subhash Mahahan,DTE official.

This year the DTE had extended the date of registration so that students who faced difficulties in arranging documents would not miss the registration thus lowering the admissions count further. However,the numbers of applicants went up only by a few thousands in the two days.“To tide over the vacancies,AICTE had also lowered its eligibility criteria for engineering/technical courses from 50 per cent in Class XII (in PCM) to 45 per cent for the general category. This also,apparently,failed to attract more students,” the official said.

Around 2.8 lakh students had appeared for the engineering subjects (physics-chemistry-mathematics: PCM) in MHT-CET this year. The tuition fee waiver scheme (TFWS) also help increase number of seats by at least 5 per cent,the official said.

An analysis showed that while several engineering seats in rural areas were not filled,the vacancies were also in specific branches of engineering like production and instrumentation that are not very popular among students.

“Apart from the colleges in periphery areas of Vidarbha,Marathwada,Nagpur and Jalgaon,many colleges in cities like Pune and Mumbai faced difficulties in filling the seats for information technology (IT),chemical,production and textile engineering,” said a DTE official.