BHUBANESWAR: For the Higher Education department, both self-financing colleges and courses have seemingly become a cause of worry. If the UG admission trends are any indication, higher educational institutions being run on self-financing mode besides, self-financing (SF) courses are witnessing a large number of vacant seats.
The state has 1,058 degree colleges of which, 200 are self-financial colleges. In the rest of the institutions, which belong to different categories including government, aided and unaided, many courses are being offered in self-financing mode either by the institutions themselves or in public-private partnership mode. Such courses have a total seat strength of 5,054.
On a whole, close to 79,000 seats across arts, commerce, biological science, physical science, self-financing, sanskrit and law streams are vacant in 1,058 colleges. Of the 5,054 seats in self-financing courses, around 1,800 are vacant.
In Khurda district, around 1,664 seats have been assigned for self-financing courses but only 423 students have taken admission, leaving 1,241 seats without any takers. This is the highest vacancy for self-financing courses. In Kendrapara, 50 pc seats of the 62 self-financing courses are vacant. At Cuttack, 230 seats are lying empty.
As far as self-financing colleges are concerned, officials in charge of admissions in the DHE said majority of the vacancies are currently in such colleges while seats in government colleges have been filled up. “Students taking admissions in the three phases prefer government colleges over self-financing ones considering the fee structure,” an official said. Since the self-financing colleges are run entirely based on fees collected from students, they charge more fees as compared to every other category of colleges.
“Even after spot admission, 99 pc of the vacancies will be seen in self-financing colleges. And this has been a trend for the last five years since the number of such colleges began increasing. The DHE needs to rethink on its policy of allowing self-financing colleges to open in districts,” said educationist PK Tripathy.