Sale of admission forms picks up at top city colleges

Colleges have been doing brisk sale of forms for first-year degree college courses since Friday, when the results for Class 12 state board exams were declared. Bhavya Dore reports.

Colleges have been doing brisk sale of forms for first-year degree college courses since Friday, when the results for Class 12 state board exams were declared.

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At KC College in Churchgate, more than 1,000 forms have been sold so far, while at St Andrew’s College in Bandra 1,110 have been sold and about 200 at RA Podar. Application forms will be available until June 4.

St Andrew’s College has gone back to the paper application process after experimenting with the online process as it didn’t work out last year. However, at St Xavier’s College, this will be the fourth year of online applications for degree college aspirants.

“We have had no problem at all, it has been going well,” said Father Frazer Mascarenhas, principal of St Xavier’s. As the process is online, he said he did not have a track of how many forms had been filled in so far.

Forms for the unaided courses have been selling particularly well. “The trend is the same as previous years, with maximum forms being sold for Bachelor of Management Studies, Bachelor of Mass Media," said Manju Nichani, principal of KC College.

“There are enough seats, but there is always a rush for certain few good institutions,” said Naresh Chandra, pro vice chancellor of the university. “The majority wants to go to certain institutions and that’s where there is an imbalance.”

In the mean time, Mumbai University is awaiting the government’s nod for setting up 46 new colleges in the state. All of these applications are for colleges in Thane, Raigad and Ratnagiri districts. More than 80 applications for opening new divisions in existing colleges are also awaiting government clearance.

Once admissions are completed, the university is for the first time this year planning to get enrollment data on all first year students, by having the students fill up information themselves. Last year, colleges had filled in the data for third year students, resulting in a lot of errors and discrepancies.

“If a student fills it in himself or herself the chances of errors are minimised,” said Chandra.