AP Engineering Colleges seek reduction in seats

Nellore: Though its sounds odd, majority engineering colleges in the district that failed to fill seats in all streams placed a request before the Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University to reduce number of seats. 

This was due to decision of the students who prefer quality education and infrastructure relocating to other places across the country for better instruction. Consequently, around 52 pc of seats were unfilled during the first phase of counselling.

There are 21 engineering colleges in the district when compared to 2016 when 24 were operational offering courses in streams such as Civil, CSE, ECE, EEE, EIE and others. Basically, students prefer CSE, ECE and EEE branches owing to good avenues after completion of the course or during campus selection.

According to sources, around 8,000-9,000 students from the district prefer other cities in the State and also colleges in other States for pursuing engineering education due to lack of proper amenities, faculty and campus placements in the local colleges. Some colleges are reportedly managing some companies to conduct campus selections and they never send offer letters giving nightmarish experience to the students.

This has turned out to be a major disadvantage for many colleges that normally boast about their campus selections and the quality of education.  In fact, 80 pc of the total seats are being filled only in 3 colleges in the district and hardly 10 per cent of seats are being filled in 3 other colleges.

So, managements of these engineering colleges have appealed to the authorities of JNTU to reduce number of the seats in some streams on which the students were not showing interest. A senior official said around 40 pc in ECE, 39.6 pc in EEE, 48.5 pc in mechanical and 52.4 pc in IT were only filled in the first phase counselling. About 50 pc seats are lying vacant in 6 colleges across the district.