Parents, students miffed over first-come, first-served round
Despite many vacant seats, students with higher merit cannot get college of choice.
Students, parents and activists have asked the state education department to have yet another merit-based seat allotment for junior colleges instead of the first-come, first-served (FCFS) round.
Monday was the first day of the FCFS round. Students who have scored 80-100% marks in their boards could grab a seat in college with vacant seats across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR). Of the 681 students who were allotted colleges in the FCFS round 1 on Monday, 407 confirmed their admissions until evening.
A number of students, however, queued up outside the office of the deputy director as they could not secure a seat due to various reasons.
While many students said that they could not get a seat in their desired college as there were issues with respect to cancellation of earlier admission or updating their option forms, many others said that the process was unfair as it excluded students with a higher merit simply because someone clicked a button before them.
“My daughter has got 83% but we are still left without a seat because the college from where we had cancelled her admission did not cancel it in the online system. With the cancellation option not open for colleges, we have to wait till the next admission,” said Sanjana Chavan, a resident of Borivli.
Over 76,000 seats, majority of which belong to unaided colleges, are up for grabs in the FCFS rounds. The highest number of vacant seats lie in the Commerce stream (32,160) followed by Science (30,183) and Arts (11,708) streams.
Sudhakar Tamboli, a senate member at the University of Mumbai (MU) who has written to the education department opposing the FCFS round, said that the decision is against the orders of the court in the past which have stressed on conducting merit-based online rounds. “If students are still left to get a seat and if there are enough seats, why not do a merit-based round with all the steps?” he asked.
The state education department would conduct a second FCFS round, which is likely to include ATKT (Allowed To Keep Terms) students and the others who have still not registered in the system.