Over 1,000 Courses See Zero Admissions, Karnataka Govt Colleges Face Deepening Crisis

More than 1000 undergraduate and postgraduate courses offered in government colleges in Karnataka remained without enrolment of even a single student in the 2025-26 academic year. This is a reflection of the students' trend of dropping certain programmes. Higher Education Minister M. C. Sudhakar has informed the Legislative Council that the government is exploring the option of stopping these courses from 2026-27.

Department of Higher Education data further reveals that only 1091 of these courses are undergraduate level and 170 of them are postgraduate programmes. They cover various subjects like criminology at a first-grade college in Bagalkot and postgraduate studies in earthquake engineering at University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering, Bengaluru. Karnataka NEET PG 2026: Demand Drops Across Courses

Recently Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA) finished the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test, NEET PG counselling. Post-allotment data indicates that 783 among 4773 postgraduate medical seats (approximately 16%) have remained vacant in the entire state.

This year roughly 14,400 candidates got themselves registered to participate in the counselling process. Besides, around 10,000 of them actively entered their web options through the KEA portal. According to experts, the main cause of such a large number of vacant seats is the tremendous increase of 967 seats in just one year along with the long counselling schedule.

Almost all of the unoccupied seats belong to the management quota, where fees fluctuate considerably from a minimum of 25,000 for courses like anatomy to a maximum of 1.3 crore for the dermatology programmes in private colleges.

Even seats in some of the most sought-after specialisations remain vacant. For general medicine, 37 out of 500 seats have not been sold. At the same time, MD radiodiagnosis still has 35 seats that are vacant out of a total of 287, whereas general surgery has 11 seats out of 425 that are still available. Likewise, dermatology has 15 vacant seats out of 196, and paediatrics has 25 out of 362 seats that have not been taken up.

One report of the media reveals that year-on-year a comparison reveals the change in the way of thinking. Through KEA counselling 3 806 PG medical seats were allotted in the year 202425, out of which 3,378 were occupied and 428 remained vacant. Strikingly, all of the unfilled seats were in pre- and para-clinical courses.

Similarly, in 2023, around 478 seats went unallocated, again largely in pre- and para-clinical streams. This stands in contrast to the current year, where even seats in highly sought-after specialisations are remaining vacant.