Why just 60% of JEE Main passouts register for the IIT-JEE Advanced 2022?

Last year, out of 2.6 lakh candidates who cleared the JEE (Main), 1.5 lakh registered for JEE (Advanced). Whereas in 2020, out of 2.5 lakh candidates who cleared JEE (Main) 1.6 lakh had registered for JEE (Advanced.) In both years, only 1.5 lakh students appeared for the test. There are 16,232 seats available, including in all the 23 IITs, which is a considerable increase from 13,000 in 2019. The increase includes 1,583 supernumerary seats for females.

However, in recent times, IITs have been witnessing vacancy issues, especially the new IITs. While 121 seats were left vacant in 2017, it was only 96 in the previous year. According to officials at the Joint Seat Allocation Authority (JoSAA), older IITs and popular courses do not see vacancies. “Whereas if a student does not manage to get a seat in a course or IIT he/she desires. taking admission to non-IIT technology college is preferred,” an official shared.

Talking about the lesser number of students registering for the JEE Advanced, V Ramgopal Rao, former Director of the IIT Delhi said, “With several options available now after clearing JEE-Main, not many are willing to take additional efforts for JEE-Advanced. Also, everything these days is decided by students based on branches. If after JEE-Main, someone is going to get a better branch at NIT, most likely the candidate will go ahead with it.”

Rao also shared how he, as IIT-Delhi director, had proposed increasing the number of qualifying candidates to three lakh and also introducing incentives such as waiving of fee for girl students. “Anyway, we are looking at bringing gender diversity on campuses. Incentives like waiving fees for female students coming from economically weaker sections of society among all shall be encouraging more students to seek admission in IIT.”