Changing trend

THE traffic on E.V. Ramasamy High Road (formerly Poonamallee High Road) is roaring at high noon. But as one steps on to the wooded campus of the Government College of Fine Arts, less than a kilometre away from the Chennai Central railway station, the decibel level drops drastically. In this quiet and clean-air surrounding, students sitting in front of a heritage building (the administrative building of the college) are engrossed in making a sketch of it. One of the students doing the sketch is P. Abirami of Kasuva near Periapalayam village in Tiruvallur district of Tamil Nadu, a second-year Bachelor of Fine Arts (Painting) student. “I love drawing,” she says, making it clear why she joined the course. “I belong to Sevalaya Home at Kasuva. Sevalaya runs a school there, with 1,500 students. When I obtain my degree, I will join the school and teach painting,” she says.

Her classmate N. Yuvaraj of Villivakkam in Chennai, seated a few steps away, is making a sketch of the building's facade. “I was interested in drawing right from my childhood. My friends encouraged me to join this course. There is no use studying animation without knowing how to draw because skill in drawing is essential for 2D and 3D animation,” he says.

Seated on a bench on the spotlessly clean campus of Rajalakshmi Engineering College at Thandalam near Poonamallee, a group of students hold an animated discussion. Most of them are students of Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE), Electrical and Electronics Engineering (EEE) or Computer Science and Engineering (CSE). But S. Sandhya from Ponneri near Chennai is a second-year Biomedical Engineering student. “I joined the course because I am interested in Biomedical Engineering,” she says. S. Suraj, a student of Aeronautical Engineering, too seems to know his mind. “My dream is to become an aircraft maintenance engineer. After my graduation, I will study MSc in Avionics,” he says. But K.P. Ramkumar and P. Ramasubramanian admit that they joined the EEE and CSE courses because their parents wanted them to. “Of course, we are also interested,” says one of them, as an afterthought.

On the notice board at Sri Jayendra Saraswathi Ayurveda College and Hospital, Poonamallee, the list of 50 students admitted to the Bachelor of Ayurvedic Medicine and Surgery (BAMS) is posted. Of the selected candidates, 33 are from Kerala, two are from Andhra Pradesh, one is from Mumbai, and just a couple of them are from Tamil Nadu. “People in Tamil Nadu are not aware of Ayurveda as a system of medicine. They prefer Siddha,” says Dr K.S. Jayashree, Principal and Dean. “Once you complete the course, you are sure to get a job in Kerala at resorts, hospitals or State Tourism hotels or you can practise on your own,” she says.

At Presidency College in Chennai, A. Muthusamy, who is pursuing BA in Tamil Literature, says he wants to sit for the Civil Services examinations. Although Tamil Nadu has the largest number of engineering colleges in India (517), there is an increasing awareness about the potential of other courses to make a career. Of the 2.2 lakh seats available in the engineering colleges, 1.47 lakh will be filled up through single-window counselling conducted by the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions 2011. The remaining 73,000 are management quota seats of self-financing engineering colleges. Of the 1.47 lakh seats, 32,000 are not expected to be filled up. (In 2010-11, when the State had 472 engineering colleges and 1,20,020 seats were available through single-window admission, 8,172 seats fell vacant.)

In some colleges, Mechanical Engineering seems to buck the trend. According to Ishari K. Ganesh, founder and Chancellor of Vels University, Chennai, there is “a huge demand” for admission to BE or BTech in Mechanical Engineering this year. After Mechanical Engineering, the run continues for a seat in ECE and CSE. “ECE has got its own demand. A number of girls aspire to study ECE,” Ishari Ganesh said.

R. Loganathan from Pudupet village near Panruti is waiting for his turn for counselling under the Tamil Nadu Engineering Admissions. He wants to study Civil Engineering but cannot explain why.

There has been a huge demand for admission to arts and science courses in the past few years. “There is a change in the trend,” said G. Thiruvasagam, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Madras. While there will be no takers for 32,000 seats in various engineering colleges, arts and science colleges have received 30 per cent more applications this year. The reasons he attributes for this are that engineering education has become more expensive, the duration of an engineering course is longer, tuition fees are not charged in government and aided arts and science colleges, and more and more colleges are teaching soft skills to their students to make them more employable.

“The main challenge in higher education is to make it employable education… to convert the youth into effective human resource power,” he said. The university has redesigned several courses to make the students more employable (see separate story).

The issue of unemployability of engineering graduates came to the fore when Union Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal flagged it on January 3 in his keynote address to the Indian Science Congress held at SRM University, near Chennai. “…We have over 3,000 engineering institutions and colleges across the country, which produce nearly five lakh engineering graduates. While this expansion has made engineering education accessible to a large number of people, the quality of education imparted is a matter of concern,” he said.