16-05-2025
Its concerns allayed by university, Ahmedabad's St Xavier's College gives in-principle nod to join Gujarat Common Admission Service
This academic session onwards, students wishing to study at St Xavier's College can apply for it through the Gujarat Common Admission Service (GCAS) – the portal launched by the state government in 2024 for admission to colleges affiliated with government universities.
On Friday, the autonomous college in Ahmedabad affiliated to Gujarat University gave an in-principle approval to join the GCAS for admission to nearly 2,500 seats of undergraduate (UG) and postgraduate programmes (PG) in the 2025-26 academic session.
'We had certain apprehensions, including logistical difficulties, in joining GCAS unconditionally which we will submit to the university authorities in writing on Saturday. The university had promised to address these apprehensions and make a technical team available to look into the issues,' the principal of St Xavier's College, Vinayak Jadav, told The Indian Express.
The 'apprehensions' include 'time misalignment' with the college authorities stating that its session begins on June 16 every year while the GCAS admission process ends in August-September.
Further, the college has raised concerns over the fee collected through GCAS going to the state government, besides the several diagnostic exams the college conducts to test skills for admission to programmes like M Sc Biotech, M A English and others.
Besides, concerns over starting new courses would be discussed with the university authorities during the meeting on Saturday. 'The process to start new courses has to be completed before April but the GCAS admissions takes longer,' the principal stated.
During a meeting in February, certain issues were taken up and deliberated upon during the GCAS review meeting held under the chairmanship of Higher and Technical Education Minister Rushikesh Patel along with State Education Minister Praful Pansheriya in Gandhinagar.
These included additional financial burden borne by the students in going to cyber cafes to fill online forms; mistakes during form-filling causing discrepancies at the time of admission; colleges offering admissions to more students than their intake; university and colleges not providing details of eligibility of different programmes, intake, fee, live vacancy; cut-off of previous rounds etc. During the meeting, it was decided that these issued would be taken care of in the second year of GCAS.
As per government records, more than 4.55 lakh admissions were made in UG and PG through the GCAS portal in 2024-25.
