Over 53,000 seats remain vacant in engineering colleges at the end of a month of counseling through the single-window system of admission. A staggering 52,615 seats are in self-financing colleges.

In the last few days of counseling at the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions (TNEA) 2011, on an average more than 30 percent of the students had been absent — a number that progressively increased by one percentage point every day.

By the time counseling ended 1.26 lakh students had been called for the single-window admission, of which 95,615 were given seats. As many as 38,897 failed to turn up while 283 skipped (two were rejected). The absentee rate was 35.57 per cent. At the end of July, the average rate of absentees was 24.37 per cent. A 25 percent absentee rate could mean 36,000 seats falling vacant.

There were 788 seats waiting to be filled in constituent colleges of five Anna Universities of Technology (AUT) as the government’s merger plan is yet to be announced. In government and aided colleges, only one seat was available under SC Arundhathiar quota. Last year, the number of applications was 1.60 lakh and the intake was 1.20 lakh students of which 1.12 lakh were admitted and 8,000 seats fell vacant.

This year, the number of applications was 1.5 lakh, including those from vocational stream students. Under the academic stream, 1.44 lakh will be participating in the counseling. And the admission intake this year has equaled the number of applicants at 1.44 lakh with new colleges and more courses in existing institutions added to the single-window admission.

As many as 36 new engineering colleges have joined the single-window admission this academic year. Apart from this, the self-financing colleges have been surrendering seats from the 75,000 seats available under the management quota; officials say that such surrendering of seats could push the number of vacant seats in engineering this year to above 40,000.