Hyderabad, August 25: The sale of seats at exorbitant rates by professional colleges is passe with many of them offering MCA courses slashing their fee to
attract students who are playing hard to get this year. Many professional MCA colleges which recorded poor enrolment in Icet counselling which ended one week ago, have slashed their annual fee by 50 per cent to attract students.
Around 40 per cent of the 29,000 seats in MCA colleges in the state are lying vacant this academic year.
The merit seats for the MCA course which were priced at Rs 26,700, are now being slashed willingly by colleges for their vacant seats, bringing it down from Rs 12,400 to 15,000. The management quota rates have also come down from a fixed fee of Rs 73,100 to a range of Rs 45,000 to Rs 50,000.
“Even students who took admissions through web-based counselling have not reported to colleges to submit their certificates. Hence, we had to postpone our starting date from August 17 to 24 in many colleges,” said P S N Raju, Icet convener, adding that the low turnout will affect the functioning of many MCA colleges.
Representatives of college managements said that filling up as many seats as possible even for a low fee could prevent the closure of many colleges. “If the seats are left vacant for one whole academic year many of our staff members will have no work. The national regulatory bodies expect us to maintain the same infrastructure and staff even for a lower number of students. Hence if the management gets at least half of the fee it could help sustain the college,” a representative of a private college management said.
Ironically, the college managements had sought an increase in fee from the Admission and Fee Regulatory Council (AFRC) in July 2009 as they anticipated a high student turnout. AFRC however, did not allow any increase in fee for the year 2009-10 as the colleges had hiked the fee by 11 per cent in the previous academic year.
Meanwhile, the officials in the higher education department said that the slump was expected as the number of takers for MCA in the academic year 2008-09 was also low. “Some of the MCA colleges were converted into MBA ones as the managements expected a poor turnout. The slump is only due to recession and lesser number of job prospects,” Raju said. He said that many of the colleges which have not filled even their management quota seats have asked the Icet committee to convert them into merit quota ones and conduct counselling for them in order to draw students.
—Agencies