Students check admission lists at Ranchi Women’s College in Ranchi on Tuesday. Picture by Prashant Mitra

Ranchi, June 17: Add-on courses offered by Ranchi University in city colleges have failed to attract students.

The add-on courses, which are running in two colleges — Marwari College and St Xavier’s College — are bioinformatics, industrial chemistry, data care management, insurance management, advertising sales, promotion management and event management.

So far, around 25-30 students have received certificates, according to official records available at the colleges. Each course has 50 seats but over half remain vacant. Some students seemed disappointed over the poor response to add-on courses.

One of the Marwari College students, Mahesh Kumar who is pursuing physics (honours) is also pursuing bioinformatics, said: “We have only 10-15 students in this course and most of them do not attend classes regularly. Moreover, classes are so arranged that we have to attend two classes simultaneously.”

While Vinod Singh, a third-year commerce student of St Xavier’s College, said the system was not feasible. “One can drop graduation or Intermediate studies and opt for a job after getting a certificate from add-on studies. But nowadays a degree is equally important, as it would give weightage to our career. But balancing both add-on courses and Honours studies is difficult,” he said.

Seeing few takers, some courses are already being withdrawn. Javed Ahmed, the principal of Marwari College has withdrawn the event management course, as there were none interested. “We would request the UGC for a mass communication course instead,” the principal said.

The principal added that the motive to start add-on courses was that students could get dual degrees. “While pursuing Intermediate studies, they can take on add-on course and get certificates. Besides, while pursuing graduation, they can also opt for a six-month or one-year diploma course. This way, they can get two to three certificates by the time they graduate,” the principal said.

St Xavier’s principal Nicholas Tete also said several vocational courses are running in the college. “The students are showing less interest in pursuing add-on courses. Vocational courses like mass communication are more in demand,” Tete said.

He added that industrial chemistry, data care management, insurance management are gaining popularity in big cities. But students would not get job opportunities in the state after pursuing them.

The principal of Doranda college, Ram Parvesh, said due to lack of adequate infrastructure, they had not applied for add-on courses as proposed by the UGC. Parvesh added that now the college building is ready and contractual teachers have been arranged. They would start the add-on courses from July.

The dual degree system was initiated by University Grants Commission (UGC) for students pursuing Intermediate and undergraduate courses.