Being the available seats filled within the first cut-off most of the popular courses won’t be offered in the second phase of the admission in delhi University,even though the first cut off being higher than the previous year’s cut off. The drop in the qualifying bar for the few popular courses that will still be open in the second phase will also be marginal.
DU has already filled a quarter of the 56,000 seats on offer. However, with colleges such as the erstwhile Dyal Singh Evening, Sri Aurobindo Evening and SGND Khalsa having admitted every few under the first list, aspirants can still have options on popular courses. According to the data provided by the university, Hindu College was the most sought-after institution in the first-list admissions, attracted over 946 approved applications. It was followed by Ramjas at 810. Such has been the response of the aspirants that Hindu is likely to leave out six courses from the second list, with the available seats in popular courses like BA (Programme), political science, chemistry and history already filled.

“We are surprised by the kind of response we got from applicants this year,” said Anshu Srivastava, principal, Hindu College. “This is despite our increasing the marks needed to qualify from the level they were last year.” Last year, the cutoff for BA (Programme) in Hindu was 96% and political science, at 96.25%. These have gone up to 97% and 96.75%, respectively, this year.

Explaining the high number of approved admissions despite the enhanced eligibility, Srivastava said, “We can possibly attribute the jump in the number of admissions to the opening of a new girl’s hostel in the college. With the accommodation that we are now able to provide to girl students, our popularity may have gone up.”
Shri Ram College of Commerce, which normally gets a majority of its available seats filled in the first list, has few seats left for the second phase this year too. College principal Simrit Kaur said that “except for economics under the SC category, both our courses are open in the second list, but there are very few seats left to be filled”. SRCC is likely to reduce the second cutoff by a few points, taking it down to 97.75% in BCom (hons) and 98.25% in economics, down from 98.75% and 98.5%, respectively, in the first list.

However, many colleges failed to attract applications, even for popular courses. Psychology, a course in which the available seats were filled in Lady Shri Ram College, only found 11 approved takers at Aryabhatta College. According to the college, admissions for this subject are likely to improve under the second list.
The erstwhile Dyal Singh Evening College, according to data from the university, admitted only two students in the three days of the admission process after the publication of the first cutoff list. “A primary reason for this is because many aspirants were unaware that we are now a morning college and that we also have the admissions formalities during the morning hours,” suggested Prithviraj Thapar, who is in charge of admissions.