Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Majority of students opt for engineering courses or drop out after school

Chennai: Arts and science colleges in the state are facing huge vacancies in undergraduate and postgraduate courses with a major chunk of the students joining engineering colleges or dropping out after school. “The trend is no doubt on the reverse swing in recent years. Still more than 50,000 seats in undergraduate and postgraduate courses have fallen vacant annually since 2007-08, which is disturbing,” said an official of Tamil Nadu higher education department.

Statistics indicate that last year alone 52,153 seats in undergraduate and postgraduate courses had no takers in the 578 government, aided and self-financing arts and science colleges in the state. “The vacancies are significantly higher in the 383 self-financing institutions. The vacancies have fallen by 9,800 seats compared to 2008. This could be because last year engineering colleges surprisingly registered a negative growth due to the recession in the information technology sector job market,” he added.

Of the 2,56,238 seats available in courses like BA, BSc and BCom, only 2,17,329 were filled. In the postgraduate segment, 36,104 students were admitted against a sanctioned strength of 49,348. Many of the colleges which failed to attract students are outside Chennai city. University of Madras V-C G Thiruvasagam attributed the vacancies to the economic recession. Due to the slowdown, the number of students opting for computer science re-lated courses had dwindled over the past two years. And when the job market was good noncomputer courses like History, Zoology, Botany and Economics did not attract many students.

“Invariably, now all universities have realised the need for redesigning curriculum to make them attractive and job-oriented. Since computers are completely essential, every graduate needs knowledge of them, which can be taught as part of the curriculum,” the vice chancellor said.

Noting that more than 65% of the job vacancies were in the service sector, Thiruvasagam said that “these companies prefer arts and science degree holders. At the University of Madras we are planning to introduce courses which will have just 50% content in the core area and the rest will be a combination of computer application, English and Tamil communicative skills.” Under this pattern, science students can study inter-disciplinary courses like financial management or accounting.