Around 60 to 80 students of KC College at Churchgate have been left in the lurch after the college expressed its inability to give them admission to FYBCom due to shortage of seats.
The college claims it has admitted students to its sanctioned capacity and does not have any seats left for in-house students, but will try and accommodate them by the end of this week.
Darshana Shah (name changed), a student who appeared for the HSC exam from the Commerce stream of KC College earlier this year, claimed that she failed to get a seat in FYBCom despite being an in-house student.
“The college simply closed admissions saying all the seats were exhausted and they could not accommodate any more students. As we are in-house students, we did not apply for admissions to any other college, and now the college has claimed that there are no more seats for us,” said Shah.
According to the admission rules of University of Mumbai, it is mandatory for a college to admit in-house students. The college can only offer seats to outside students, if it has seats in surplus. However, KC College has failed to admit all its students so far.
On inquiring with sources in the college, it came to light that while the college had 480 seats in SYJC, the seats were reduced by half in FYBCom. Thus, even if all the 480 students passed the HSC exams, the college would not be in a position to admit all of them in FYBCom.
“How can the college have double the number of seats in SYJC if it has half the number of seats in degree college?” asked an infuriated parent. The parent added that the college should have brought parity in the number of seats in both the classes by increasing or decreasing the number of seats either in degree or junior college.
Mridul Nile, director students welfare, University of Mumbai, said that it was shocking that the college had such a callous approach and had compromised the future of students. “I will speak with the college authorities as well as the officials from the affiliation department of the University to find out if the college had reduced its capacity in FYBCom,” he said.
Manjula Nichani, principal of KC College, however, denied refusing admissions to the students. “We are currently in the process of calculating the seats in all the courses. Since many in-house
students have applied for self-financed courses
being offered by the college, we expect seats in the BCom stream to get vacated. The students who have failed to get admission as of now, will be given those seats. We expect the situation to be resolved by Saturday,” said Ms Nichani.