The University Grants Commission has instructed Vice-Chancellors to submit proposals for enrolling students at all universities on the same date, after acknowledging that admission to some institutions currently takes around eighteen months.
UGC Vice Chairman Professor Wasantha Liyanage said it presently takes about a year and a half to enrol students who qualify for university admission through the G.C.E. Advanced Level examination at certain universities, NewsFirst reported.
Students selected for Engineering and Medical faculties, by contrast, are enrolled across all universities without such delays, he said.
What the Vice-Chancellors have been asked to do
Professor Liyanage said Vice-Chancellors have been asked to:
- identify the reasons for delays in student enrolment at their institutions
- propose solutions to address them
- recommend measures to be implemented in coming years
Steps will be taken to resolve the problem once the proposals have been considered, he said.
Why this matters
The gap the UGC describes is not a scheduling inconvenience. A student who sits A-Levels and waits eighteen months to enrol loses that time entirely — it falls after the examination and before the degree begins, and it is added to a course length that is typically three or four years. The effect is that two students with the same results, admitted in the same cycle to different faculties, can graduate more than a year apart.
That the medical and engineering faculties already admit on time is the significant detail in the UGC’s account: it establishes that the delay is not inherent to the admission system — which is centrally administered by the UGC on a single national merit list — but arises at faculty or institution level. It is the reason the Commission is asking Vice-Chancellors rather than reforming the central process.
The Commission handles admissions for the state university system at scale. Cut-off marks released in the August 2026 cycle covered some 92,043 qualified applicants, against intake capacity for a far smaller number — and the UGC’s admissions handbook release is itself an annual fixture of the calendar.
Not reported
NewsFirst does not identify which universities or faculties carry the eighteen-month delay, give the deadline for Vice-Chancellors to submit proposals, or say what is causing the delays — whether capacity, staffing, registration processing or examination-result timing. It does not say whether the single common enrolment date is intended for the next intake or a later one, and it carries no response from any Vice-Chancellor or from the Ministry of Education.
No other verified newsroom had filed on the instruction at the time of writing.
