Heads of state-aided colleges in Bengal have urged the state higher education department to start the process of admission of students to undergraduate courses of 2025 session immediately after the announcement of results of Class XII board exams.

 

The college principals have requested the department to open the state’s centralised online portal early to ensure that students of the state are not forced to take admission in private institutions or move to other states.

 

Senior officials of the state higher education department held a meeting with principals of state-aided colleges on Tuesday where the heads expressed concern over the large number of seats remaining vacant in various courses. They said the the seats had remained vacant due to the delay on the part of the government in opening the centralised online admission portal and starting the admission process late last year.

 

In 2024, the admission process started on June 24, nearly one and half months after the publication of various plus two board results. By the time the admissions started most students, many of them meritorious and high performers had already taken admissions to private colleges or moved to other states where the admission process had started much earlier.

 

Sources in Calcutta University said in all there are over 2.20 lakh undergraduate seats in the 140 odd colleges affiliated to it. Close to one lakh seats were filled last year which means there were no takers for nearly 50 percent seats.

 

Some principals who attended the meeting said their colleges had started noticing low enrolment in 2023 when the government introduced the four-year honours courses replacing the previous three-year degree (honours) courses. But, apart from this, the delay in starting the admission process led to further rise in number of vacant seats, principals said.

 

” The centralised online admission portal was launched last year. It was a good move. But the admission process started late and seats in many courses remained vacant because of the delay. We have urged the authorities to take necessary steps to start the process early, immediately after the announcement of Higher Secondary, ISC and CBSE Class XII results this year,”  Indranil Kar principal of Surendranath College in Kolkata told EducationWorld.

 

An official of the higher education department said the centralised online system was launched last year and it functioned very well.

” The meeting with the college heads were held to discuss the problems they faced last year and find out the ways to address those problems so that the admissions can be held flawlessly this year,” the official said.

 

Last year the state government for the first time introduced a web-based online portal for centralised and online admission to undergraduate degree courses in state-run and state-aided colleges and universities.

 

In the new system, a student could apply to whichever state-run or state-aided college or university she or he wanted by logging into a single portal instead of seperately logging into the admission portals of individual colleges, the system which used to be practiced till 2023.