When online registrations were introduced this year to the Centralised Admissions Procedure (CAP) for Std XI, it was supposed to make the process easier and more transparent for students, guaranteeing that everyone would get a seat in one of the city colleges. Ironically though, after three rounds of admissions, as many as 3,000 students have not found any seats through CAP, even though more than double the number of seats (6184) are still vacant in colleges across the city. Several of the city’s prominent colleges still have many vacant seats.

Wild seat chase: Students will now have to make individual applications to every college they hope to get a seat in. Representation Pic.

Fergusson College has 23 vacant seats in the Science stream, including aided and unaided courses. Abasaheb Garware College has 30 seats available, Nowrosjee Wadia Junior College has as many as 103 seats, while Poona College has vacancy of 113 seats. The scenario is similar even in the Arts and Commerce streams. Surekha Dange, vice-principal of Sir Parshurambhau (SP) College said, “There are several reasons behind these vacant seats in junior colleges in the city. As there was a chance for seats in better colleges, many students have cancelled their admission in the college allotted to them after the second merit list was published. In other cases, outstation students could not complete their admission procedure in time.”