Mumbai: As the third and final regular round of First Year Junior College (FYJC) admissions came to an end, only 1.44 lakh out of 2.78 lakh (52%) registered candidates from Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) have confirmed their admissions.
The remaining 1.34 lakh students will now have to try their luck in two or more special rounds of admission, which will begin on Monday (July 17).
While the bulk of the candidates (1.08 lakh) were admitted through the general Centralised Admission Process (CAP), others got entered through various quotas. The first round CAP round saw the highest number of admissions (around 57% of all CAP entrants), followed by the second (19%) and third (23%) rounds.
The Commerce stream has so far attracted the highest number of students (74,281), while the Science, Arts and Vocational streams got 53,291, 15,678 and 1,207 candidates respectively.
While there were over 1.44 lakh students in contention in the third and the final regular round, only 57,147 were allotted seats in their junior college of choice. Of these, only 20,980, or around 37%, decided to confirm their admissions while the rest chose to further wait for a more preferred college. Even 6,262 out of 16,979 students who were allotted their first choice of college didn't report for admission.
Most of the students prefer to keep trying for better opportunities instead of confirming their seats early on. Many of them keep changing the order of preference after every round, resulting in a prolonged admission process.
The students that haven't found a seat yet will still have an opportunity in the special rounds, as over 2.4 lakh of 3.83 lakh (62%) of the total available seats in MMR are still vacant. These include around over 42,000 seats that were earlier reserved for minority, in-house and management quotas, but have now been surrendered by the junior colleges for the general admission rounds and will be available to all the candidates.
However, this year, the state school education department has done away multiple First Come First Serve (FCFS) rounds which allowed students to claim the vacant seats by rushing to colleges of their choice. Instead, if there are any students left after two special rounds, the department will publish Daily Merit Lists to admit students on a day-to-day basis.
