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Hat-trick of delays: Most FYJC colleges to start only by mid-Aug

Shreya Bhandary & Yogita Rao | TNN

It’s the second week of August, but first-year junior college (FYJC) lectures across almost all city colleges have yet to begin, with more than 5,000 students still waiting to be assigned a seat. Principals are worried that with another list scheduled to be announced on August 12, before offline admissions begin on August 16, lectures will be delayed even further. The fact that professors have to cover a revised syllabus means that pressure on students and faculty members will intensify.
A few colleges such as St Xavier’s and HR Colleges in south Mumbai have already started lectures, but they are the exceptions. In fact, most principals say that with the delays in the online admission process, they don’t even know how many seats are vacant or the total number of students who have secured their seats.

M B Kekare, principal of Patkar Varde College in Goregaon (W) said that lectures will begin only by mid August. “We don’t believe in starting lectures before students have been allotted seats. Once the online admission process is over, our vacant seats will be put up for offline admissions. Our classes won’t begin until all students secure a seat,” said Kekare.

Many colleges are now waiting for a circular from the office of the deputy director of education (school) before they announce the induction programs for their students.

Apart from the delay in the admission process, the coming long weekend from August 13 to 15 has many colleges wondering how they will complete the admission process in time.

A handful of colleges, however, have already started classes with whatever strength that has been allotted to their respective streams. “We arranged the induction session for the new batch last weekend itself and started classes on Monday. We will conduct remedial classes for those students whose names appear in the fifth list,” said Fr Frazer Mascarenhas, principal of St Xavier’s College. H R College at Churchgate, also started their first day of lectures on Monday. “We had very few seats left for the last list and were surprised and happy to see our classes full on the first day itself,” said Deepika Bhatia, vice-principal of H R College.