AICTE cuts intake in 122 Tamil Nadu colleges – Times of India

CHENNAI: The All India Council for Technical Education has reduced intake by 50% for courses with poor admission in the last five years in engineering colleges and polytechnics in Tamil Nadu. Seats for courses with less than 30% admissions have been reduced in 122 engineering colleges and 155 polytechnics, data from a RTI reply shows.
While the sanctioned strength for a course is 60 seats, most courses now have only 30; in some colleges the numbers are as low as 15 and 12 seats.

Surprisingly, intake has been cut for popular branches such as electronics and communications engineering (ECE), computer science engineering (CSE) and information technology. In many colleges, as expected, mechanical engineering and electrical and electronics engineering (EEE) faced similar cuts in 2019-20.
Of the 500-odd colleges, more than 100 recorded between 10% and 20% in admissions in the last few years, experts said. “Due to poor admissions, they have not been able to retain faculty members and the students strength also witnessed steep decline.”
Asked about poor admissions in branches such as CSE and ECE, Valliammai Engineering College principal B Chidambararajan said these two branches got filled only in the top 400 colleges. “For the past few years, civil and mechanical had fewer takers. This year even EEE registered poor admissions,” he said, adding that students now were keen on CSE and IT due to better placements.
Even top engineering colleges, another principal said, were reducing intake in branches such as mechanical and ECE due to declining interest. “A top college in the city that had 240 seats in mechanical branch has reduced it to just 60 seats.”
Some colleges hope they will be able to attract more students with new courses like BTech in artificial intelligence and data science set to be offered from next academic year. Educational consultant D Nedunchezhiyan said only top 100 colleges were able to fill all seats in the last few years.
“The AICTE should have thought about it before giving approval to courses and colleges instead of doing postmortem after many years,” he said.
After enduring poor admissions over the last few years, 11 engineering colleges in the state recently applied to Anna University to close down from the 2020-21 academic year. Seven others have sought to stop new admissions.
The total number of engineering colleges under Anna University including stand-alone institutions offering architecture, MBA and MCA courses is now down to 537 from 557 in 2019-20.