Many top-scoring students turn away from engineering admissions in Maharashtra
The data shows that even among students scoring 95–100 percentile, as many as 1,322 did not participate in the state’s Centralised Admission Process (CAP) rounds
Nearly 2,972 high-scoring students in Maharashtra have opted out of engineering admissions this year, despite strong performance in the state’s Common Entrance Test (CET), according to a report by the State CET Cell.
This year’s CET, conducted for admissions to engineering colleges across the state, saw 22 students achieve a perfect 100 percentile, while 43,299 scored between the 90th and 99.99th percentile. However, only two of the 22 toppers chose to enrol in state engineering colleges. The remaining 20 reportedly secured seats at Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) through their performance in the JEE Advanced exam.
The data shows that even among students scoring 95–100 percentile, as many as 1,322 did not participate in the state’s Centralised Admission Process (CAP) rounds. Similarly, 1,876 out of 2,661 students in the 85–95 percentile bracket did not take admission. Overall, 2,972 high-performing students from the 85–100 percentile range skipped both CAP and subsequent institutional rounds.
Officials from the CET Cell suggested that “one reason could be that many of these students applied only to top-tier engineering colleges with very high cut-offs, and their names did not appear on those lists. However, a large number of these students have instead joined prestigious national-level institutions based on their JEE Main or Advanced scores.”
This trend highlights a growing preference among high-achieving students for premier institutions like the IITs, NITs, and other centrally funded universities over state-level engineering colleges. The shift is expected to affect admissions in Maharashtra’s engineering institutions, particularly those that have traditionally attracted top scorers.
In recent years, state engineering colleges have struggled to fill seats, and the migration of top performers to national institutes is seen as a key contributing factor.
