D-day for 3,000 Pune students who are without college seats

Admissions

Nearly 3,000 students who have not secured admission to Std XI course in city colleges will be anxious and nervous today - colleges in the city will release individual merit lists after accepting applications for admissions offline after the centralised admission process (CAP) was unable to provide seats to the hopefuls.

Long line: There are 190 seats vacant in the Science course at Nowrsojee Wadia College, but 484 have applied for them. File pic

There are nearly 3,000 such students who had been left without a seat after three CAP rounds due to different reasons - some didn't get a college of their choice, while others simply weren't allotted a choice through the computerised merit list.

Nowrsojee Wadia College

After the CAP rounds were over, students were then told to apply individually to each college physically (‘3,000 college students left in the lurch by CAP', July 16). However, what is worrying is the fact that the number of applicants is several times that of the number of vacant seats in the reputed colleges.

Mid-day's July 16 report on the admissions process

Too many for too few
On Saturday, CAP officials took an overview of some of the junior colleges in the city, and found that demand for certain junior colleges is far more than the number of seats. This has lead to the question whether these 3,000 students would be able to get a seat, or whether another round of admission has to be conducted to ensure seats don't go vacant. "The exact picture would get clear by Monday evening," CAP official Balasaheb Owhal said.

Huge demand: A few prominent colleges have seen a huge rush of applicants to various streams

Take, for instance, Sir Parshurambhau (SP) College - for 50 vacant seats, including open and reserved seats, as many as 273 students have applied for admission in the Science stream, according to Owhal. The ratio is even worse in the Commerce stream, where 285 hopeful are fighting it out for 25 seats.

In Fergusson College, 271 students are in the fray for 48 Science seats. In colleges like Nowrosjee Wadia, Modern and Abasaheb Garware, the number of vacant seats is considerably more, but so are the applicants - as much as five times the number of vacancies. For 190 vacancies in the Science stream in Nowrosjee Wadia College, 484 students have submitted their applications.

In Modern College, 580 are battling it out for the 115 Commerce seats. "I have scored 81% in SSC and I was expecting Garware College of Commerce, but in the first merit list I got NMV, where I didn't take admission in hope that I would get Garware or at least SP in the next two rounds. Unfortunately, I haven't been allotted any good college and since I had not accepted my admission in NMV, I applied to five colleges in the offline process. I hope I get a good college in this round," said one of the students.

This paper had also reported on the allegedly exorbitant demands of inflated fees made by colleges to admit a child through the offline process. "Even though it seems that the gap between applicants and actual vacancies in colleges is huge, in many cases students have applied in several colleges in the offline process. So, at the end of this round, all students will get admission according to their merit," explained Sandip Jadhav, another CAP official.

Meanwhile, a larger number of seats in other colleges might be left untouched - there are 6,184 vacancies to be filled after the CAP rounds, through the offline process. After the merit lists are published today, the deadline for securing admission is July 22 to July 24.