Delhi University : has more than 7,000 of its 71,624 UG seats available
Delhi University: The University of Delhi (DU) has failed to fill all of its undergraduate seats for the third year in a row since the Common University Entrance Test (CUET) was introduced, despite many college mop-up rounds.
The university requested comprehensive, course-specific vacancy data from its schools on Wednesday after more than 7,000 of the 71,624 undergraduate seats available as of September 2025 remained unfilled.
Vice-chancellor Yogesh Singh responded to criticism by vehemently defending the Centralised Seat Allocation approach (CSAS), which is based on the CUET. Singh said that the new admissions procedure is more responsible, transparent, and rational than the previous cut-off-based approach.
“The centralised system ensures complete visibility of seat allocation,” Singh said in a statement released on Wednesday. “Every admission is made public through a scientific, algorithm-driven process based strictly on CUET scores and candidates’ preferences.”
The vice-chancellor addressed worries that CUET has resulted in a large number of vacancies by stating that vacant seats were not a recent development.
In 2019, a pre-CUET and pre-Covid year, he said, just 68,213 seats were filled out of a sanctioned strength of 70,735, leaving 3.56% of seats empty, citing figures from the university’s admission division. In comparison, 72,229 admissions were made via the CUET-based CSAS in 2025 out of 71,642 available seats, which is 0.65% more than the authorized strength.
Singh emphasized that admissions were hard to control under the previous cut-off mechanism, which often resulted in a significant overabundance of admissions. He gave examples of institutions admitting more than 200 students while only 11 seats were authorized, which is an overadmission of around 1,745%.
He said that these disparities rendered it almost difficult to precisely monitor enrollments or guarantee adherence to approved limitations.
The Vice-Chancellor claims that the CSAS has given the admissions procedure more control and predictability. In order to reduce the number of allocation rounds, colleges now choose in advance how much more funding they want to provide; the system uses this information to inform its algorithm. In order to support future policy choices, the institution may also do predictive analysis on program popularity thanks to the centralized method.
Singh reassured that no course will be closed in response to concerns that extended vacancies would result in course closures. Rather, universities have been asked to review their seat matrices, consider rearranging the combinations of BA programs, and suggest ways to fill open positions. According to him, the goal of the exercise is to maximize seat use while finishing admissions in the fewest number of rounds, demonstrating DU’s dedication to an open and effective admissions process.