A Million Candidates Appear For JEE But Limited Career Opportunity

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Main was successfully conducted by CBSE on 2 April and as many as 10.2 lakh students appeared for the examination in more than 2000 centres across 109 cities in India.

The exam was conducted for two courses, namely BE/B Tech and BArc/BPlanning and candidates had a choice for appearing for one or both the papers.

The cut off list in 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 was 113, 115, 105, 100 respectively and it is expected to be around high 115 this year. However, the cut off for SC/ST and OBC remains below par at close to 70.

The results will be declared on 27th April 2017.

The admission in central government funded colleges for a mere 24,000 seats will be done through the merit list provided the student scores a minimum of 75 per cent in board exams. The states then allot seats on the merit list or on their respective exams.

While there is such a huge demand by students in the engineering sector, private colleges have come up to cash on the opportunity and confer them the degree to deliver the quantity, but compromise on quality. One and a half million students' pass out every year but only 10 per cent are employable. Such is the growth motive that they initiate a move to government jobs or management.

There has been a constant decline of appearing for the exam in last 2-3 exams. Introduction of minimum board percentage and addition of board marks to the JEE percentile may be the reason for this. Also, considering the lesser number of seats in government colleges, all that hard work along with the time and money invested goes into waste.

Nitish Raturi, an aspirant of JEE was not particularly happy. He said, "The paper was tricky. It required tricks to find out solutions to various questions which are not taught in school and I was hardly able to attempt half of the question paper. The exam was moderately tough. Physics and chemistry were relatively simple and Maths was the toughest part of the paper."

Engineering is seen as a high growth sector and has become a mainstream course for students in science stream. But it has gone past its zenith point and the gap between the requirement in the industry and human resource provided is huge now. Also, the private players in industry have seen it as a cash cow graduating thousands of undeserving candidates leaving them unemployed which takes the shine away from an illustrious engineering sphere.

Government aid and promotion for research would help in the employment along with a bridge between the demand and the supply of universities. People must start looking at other less explored career options since this industry is expected to grow at 5-7 per cent annually for the next there years.