A Closer Look at the 2025-26 Admissions
A recent trend seems to be emerging among the applicants in the country for chain of College and Madrasah: There is a remarkable gap in the demand level of the students in the colleges and madrasahs across the country under the first phase of admission of the class XI for the academic session of 2025-26. But despite some schools facing record demand, hundreds of others can barely get to first base with a single applicant.
As per the results posted after the centralised online admissions process, 378 colleges and madrasas nationwide did not admit any student. Among them are RMJ College in Rajshahi with 150 available seats and Jaflong Hanifa Khatun Memorial College in Sylhet with three hundred seats.
Even more shocking: ten colleges had no applications at all; nine of them are under the Barishal Education Board. One such institute, Kathalia Secondary Girls’ School and College, has 450 seats and no taker.
The Tale of Two Extremes
It has been a clear dividing line this admissions season. On one side is tens of thousands of students competing for a small number of spaces at a handful of the most popular institutions. Like the Government Ananda Mohan College in Mymensingh, which offers just 981 seats, but attracted 36,185 applications. And Adamjee Cantonment College in Dhaka, with 2,161 places, was applied for over 35,000 times.
Top-tier colleges are wrestling with a broad problem; too many people are applying – and with the knowledge that that’s happening, they are trying to figure out how to cope with it.
At the other end of the spectrum are the 378 schools that entered the first phase with classrooms to spare. The education board’s breakdown shows this to be a general problem with institutions in all parts of the country affected. “A considerable number of these, 161 in total, are madrasahs.
The Unselected Students
In this sea of institutional inequity, some 25,000-plus students who applied for admission did not make it to any at all, in a country where 2.5 million seats are on offer. This lot also included 5,765 individuals who secured GPA 5 in SSC examinations.
The Dhaka Education Board puts this down to a lack of harmony between the choices of pupils and the number of seats available. In the system, students rank 5-10 colleges during the centralised choice period. It is easy for a student not to get into a college if it is heavily oversubscribed and the student ranks only the most well-known good colleges.
Khondoker Ehsanul Kabir, chairperson of the Dhaka Education Board, said that the result was worrying, but that there were two more phases of the admissions process. He continues to be hopeful that many of these students and colleges will be a match in the later rounds. But keep in mind that your options will become far more limited in the later stages and your odds of getting into a top choice college reduced substantially.
The 2025-26 admission season offers a mixed bag after many students struggled to pass the SSC exams this year, and several colleges have no new students to admit. The coming weeks will determine if the second and third phases can bring the yawning chasm between students wanting to enrol and seats available after the choice of 74% time-tabled seats is made if the current trend will continue.
In your opinion, how can you tackle the issue of underutilisation of colleges and benefit students not selected in the initial round?