BHUBANESWAR: Students in suburban areas continue to favour traditional subjects for post-graduation (PG) over self-financing ones. While public universities in twin cities have filled up most of their seats in self-financing courses, those in suburbs have almost 50 per cent or more such seats vacant but seats in all the traditional courses have been filled up. Consider the case of Fakir Mohan University.
An MSc programme in Atmospheric Science at the university had only two admissions against the student strength of 16. Similarly, only three students were admitted to Population Studies, which has 24 seats, according to the PG admission statistics of all universities for the 2023-24 academic session. There were no takers for the Physical Education course too.
At Berhampur University, there was no admission to the Women Studies course which has 32 seats this year and only 10 students enrolled for MBA in Tourism & Travel Studies against 30 seats. Similar is the case with the Electronic Science course with 40 seats. Only 14 students took admission to the course. And the Marine Science Oceanography course got only 10 students against a strength of 25.
Similarly, at Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University, admissions are less than 50 per cent in courses like MBA, Computer Science, Library and Information Science, Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems. Balangir’s Rajendra University is also finding it tough to fill up the 32 seats in MSc Computer Science. At Rama Devi Women’s University, there are no takers for Gender Studies as only five seats have been filled up from 32. Educationist Rabindra Mishra said in the suburbs, students are mostly oriented towards traditional subjects as they aspire to get into academics.
No takers for Santali course
While Maharaja Sriram Chandra Bhanja Deo University saw all the seats in language subjects like Odia and Sanskrit being filled up, only four students have taken admission to Santali this year. The university has a strength of 50 seats for PG in Santali course but 46 of them are lying vacant. Vice-chancellor Santosh Tripathy said there is less demand among local tribal students to pursue the course as although the language was added to the Constitution’s 8th schedule in 2003, it has not been fully implemented in state’s higher education system. There are over eight lakh Santali-speaking people in the state.