Mumbai: After a restrictive implementation of fourth-year undergraduate programmes under National Education Policy (NEP) this year, Mumbai University and subsequently the state govt plan to lift all caveats for the current third-year batch, which will move to the fourth year in April-May 2027.
The requirement for a postgraduate department in the respective courses, which made several courses offered by autonomous colleges ineligible last year, will be removed.
A city college principal said that they had extensively advertised for the four-year courses on their websites since 2023, but the guidelines, which came months before the fourth-year admissions, derailed their plans.
“This year we removed all the posts advertising the fourth year and have asked students to keep their options open,” said a principal, adding that they are hoping to get the guidelines early enough to plan their course of action. Early this year, the eleventh-hour implementation guidelines put leading autonomous colleges in a spot, with several aspirants denied the option of pursuing fourth-year honours. Colleges, however, are wary of delayed guidelines this year.
Since autonomous colleges are a year ahead of the regular affiliated colleges in the implementation of NEP, their first batch of students in the fourth year was in the current academic session of 2026-27.
“Guidelines for implementation, fine-tuning the process and ensuring quality will be released and clarified soon,” said a university official. Next year, all MU and state colleges will implement the fourth year. The phase-wise implementation of the fourth-year programmes under NEP next year will also see changes in the syllabus content for the fourth year. next year, the focus will be on the core subject and industry-centric specialisation, added the university official While this year colleges were asked to follow the same syllabus as that of the first-year master’s programme. For instance, a college offering BCom (accounting and finance) or BAF was compelled to offer students an option to pursue the fourth year in either accountancy or finance as they did not have a master’s department in accounting and finance. Now, a fourth year in BAF will also be permitted without any conditions. The honours with research option, however, will be offered based on the availability of teachers as guides.