Colleges across Mumbai will first absorb own students, then others

MUMBAI: Colleges across the city will open their gates first to in-house candidates and the Covid-19 pandemic may see few students wanting to migrate to other degree colleges.
While streams such as science will witness students branching out to engineering and health sciences, arts and commerce cut-offs could soar and only a handful of seats may open up for outsiders. Admissions thus may be tougher for candidates who completed Class XII from a high school or a junior college that does not have an attached degree college.
The top autonomous colleges will not conduct their entrance test this year. These institutes, most of them among the highest rated and most popular city colleges, will probably continue with the same batch of candidates in their popular divisions. For unaided programmes, seats will open for all candidates and admissions will be conducted on the basis of their Class XII scores.
“Looking forward, we will, in the first week, admit all our in-house students first. If students migrate to other institutes, we will open admission for outsiders,” said Rajendra Shinde, principal of St Xavier’s College which has 360 seats each for arts and science in HSC, as also an equal number in first-year degree college. Last year, the cut-off for arts was 98.5% and this time around, professor Shinde expects it to cross 99.5%.
For the commerce stream, the past three years have seen a bit of easing. As Podar College principal Sobhana Vasudevan said, “Earlier, all our students used to stay back for degree college. But now, we see about 10-15 of them take the SAT and fly out abroad, some join the five-year law programme, and a few of them join the integrated management programme. Essentially, while many who want to pursue CA and CS stay back, there are other diversified areas in which commerce students are now going.”
Mumbai University’s affiliated colleges will follow the admission schedule released (see box). “Classes will currently begin online and we will follow the state government’s instructions regarding opening up,” said the spokesperson. In case of colleges such as HR and KC which have become a state cluster university, HR College principal Pooja Ramchandani said, “Students will first opt for the BCom programme and then as they get admission and a few seats may open for outsiders.”
While the HSC section has 1,034 students, the aided section has 960 seats in first-year BCom. “But students also apply for other popular courses that we offer like banking and finance, bachelors in financial markets and three BVoc courses in tourism, retail and wealth management.”