Best-ranked colleges in the country have failed to fill up seats even after four rounds of admissions, prompting Delhi University (DU) to start a mop-up round.
Several teachers have blamed the development on an opaque admission process.
Institutions such as Hindu College, Miranda House, Hans Raj College, Kirori Mal College (KMC) and St Stephen’s College are currently offering the vacant seats to students based on their Class XII marks and not the Common University Entrance Test (CUET). These five colleges, which used to see a beeline of aspirants,
still have 93 unoccupied seats (See chart).
DU has been admitting students through the CUET since 2022. Since then, thousands of seats have remained vacant in the colleges every year despite several rounds of admissions. Before 2022, when the university used to admit students based on their Class XII marks, college seats used to get filled up within four rounds.
This year, DU began the admission process in July based on CUET scores. It held three rounds of regular admissions and one round of spot admission. The process was conducted through the Common Seat Allocation System (CSAS) website. After 50 days, over 9,000 of the 71,000 seats remained vacant in the colleges.
According to the vacancy data released by DU on its admission website for the mop-up round, Bhagini Nivedita College has 709 unoccupied seats followed by Aditi College (674 seats), Zakir Husain College (387 seats), Kalindi College (385 seats), Dyal Singh College (311 seats), Bharti College (307 seats), Shyam Lal College (301 seats) and Deshbandhu College (295 seats). Most of the vacant seats are in the BA courses.
Rudrashish Chakraborty, an associate professor of English at KMC, said the CUET-based admission process through the CSAS website was fully opaque. “Ever since the CUET-based system started, the colleges have no clue about seat allocation, upgradation and cut-off. Everything is done centrally by the university,” he said.
In the ongoing mop-up round, DU has allowed candidates who have not registered on the CSAS website and did not sit for the CUET. The colleges will select students based on the Class XII score and allocate seats by September 11.
“It is a monumental failure of the university. This is the sixth week of this semester, and the university has notified another mop-up round for UG admission. There’s no explanation on how these new students will cope with the loss of six weeks of teaching in a semester spanning 14 weeks,” Chakraborty said.
Abha Dev Habib, who teaches physics at Miranda House, said students from Delhi used to fill up the seats in colleges on the outskirts of the city before the CUET started.
“The local students found the CUET to be a hurdle. They did not apply. Many students from other states with high CUET scores are not taking admission in off-campus colleges. Many students find studying in DU colleges to be costly,” she said.
Habib said the CUET and the CSAS were failed models and must be removed.
“If admissions in the final mop-up round have to be conducted on the basis of Class XII marks only, why were the earlier rounds based on the CUET? We cannot have different parameters for admissions to the same course and the same academic session,” she said.
Former president of the DU Teachers’ Association, Aditya Narayan Misra, demanded that the colleges be granted the power to decide cut-offs.
“If the university administration does not seriously address this issue soon, the university’s reputation will suffer irreparable damage. This situation signals the beginning of the decline of the university,” Misra said.