Fatima College

Of the 882 undergraduates who finished on time at Fatima College, Madurai in 2024-25, 443 went on to higher studies and 76 took a job offer. That split comes from the college's own India Rankings 2026 filing, and it has barely moved in three years. If you are weighing a B.A., B.Sc. or B.Com. at this Mary Land campus, you are joining a college where about half of each graduating class treats the first degree as a step towards the next one.

Be sure of the name before anything else. This is the autonomous women's college at Mary Land, Madurai, affiliated to Madurai Kamaraj University, and not Annai Fatima College of Arts and Science, Fatima College of Education at Nadikudi, Fatima College of Nursing at Gorakhpur, Fatima Degree College or Fatima Michael College of Engineering and Technology, all separate institutions that share part of the name.

Fatima College is a Catholic minority college for women, established and run by St. Joseph's Society of Madurai, which belongs to the Congregation of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Lyon, France, according to the college history page. It opened in 1953 as a second grade college with 63 students, became a postgraduate college in 1964, turned autonomous in 1990 and was recognised as a research institute in 2004.

The history page counts 22 undergraduate programmes, 15 postgraduate programmes, three professional programmes and eight departments that are now research centres, with 3875 students, 210 teaching staff and 90 non-teaching staff. The ranking filing counts the roll differently: 2,791 undergraduates and 912 postgraduates, every one of them a woman, with 2,783 of the undergraduates from Tamil Nadu, in the India Rankings 2026 data the college published. It carries the AISHE code C-36529, which is also its NIRF identifier.

The college runs as two shifts on one campus. Shift-I runs from 8:15 a.m. to 12:55 p.m. and Shift-II from 1:00 p.m. to 5:40 p.m., per the programmes page. The older streams page describes Shift-I as the government-funded stream meant mainly for underprivileged and backward-community students, but the current programme list puts nine self-financing master's programmes, from M.A. History to M.Sc. Data Science, in the morning shift too. The fee you pay follows the aided or self-financing label on your programme, not the time of day it meets.

Leadership has changed recently. The contact page names Dr. Sr. M. Fatima Mary as Principal, while the staff roster in the 2026 filing marks its previous principal entry as having left on 30-04-2025. The postal address is Mary Land, Madurai 625018, and the main lines are 0452 2668016 and 0452 2669015, per the contact page.

Courses divide by shift and by funding. The table below follows the college's current programme list.

Notice how small the aided postgraduate list is. Only four master's programmes sit on the government-funded side, so most women who stay on for a master's here will be paying self-financing rates.

What the MBA and MCA Cost in 2026-2027

The professional programmes are the only ones with a current fee card, and it is itemised by semester.

The prospectus marks the second-semester figures as subject to change. Tuition is only part of each bill: on the MBA, case study materials, seminars and internal assessment add several thousand rupees a semester, and a life membership of the alumnae association is billed in Semester II.

Undergraduate and Other Postgraduate Fees

For every other programme, the newest schedule on the fees page is the one for 2020-2021, filed under archives, so no current figure can be given. Read the old numbers only as a sense of the gap between the two shifts.

The MBA row shows how far that archive has drifted. Its first semester was Rs 48,500 in the 2020-2021 schedule and is Rs 66,100 in the current prospectus, so ask the Regular Courses or Self-Financing Courses reception for this year's card before you budget.

Missing a fee deadline at Fatima College has real consequences. Semester fees are due within 10 working days of reopening without a fine, a student still unpaid after 30 days is struck off the rolls, and nothing is refunded if you leave mid-semester, per the fees page. SC and ST students are exempt from tuition. The UG prospectus also states that the college takes no capitation fee or donation and asks families to report anyone who offers a seat for money.

Every application goes through the college's online portal, and printed forms are not issued. The application fee is Rs 200 for undergraduate programmes, according to the UG candidate instructions, Rs 250 for postgraduate programmes in the PG instructions and Rs 500 for the MBA and MCA in the professional programme instructions. The sample payment screens in the UG and PG leaflets show INR 150.00 and INR 200.00 instead, so pay whatever the portal itself asks.

Undergraduate Entry

No entrance test is listed for undergraduate programmes; what decides eligibility is your Class 12 subject combination. Most B.A. programmes accept any group, B.A. Tamil needs Tamil as a second language, and B.Sc. Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science and BCA need Mathematics and Physics, per the eligibility page. The one high bar is B.Com. (Honours) with ACCA, which needs Commerce, Accountancy, Business Studies and Economics with 80% of marks.

Provisionally selected applicants hear by SMS and e-mail, and those not selected hear nothing, according to the UG prospectus. The admission procedure page adds a step families should plan for: the selected candidate must come with a parent to an interview with the Principal on the date given, and missing it cancels the selection.

The document list reflects the college's minority status. Along with marks, community and income certificates, Catholic applicants upload a baptism certificate signed by their current parish priest, and district, state or national sportswomen upload their sports certificates, per the UG prospectus.

Postgraduate and Professional Entry

Most master's programmes ask for the matching bachelor's degree with 50% of marks. An entrance test is conducted for M.A. Economics, M.A. English, M.A. Tamil, M.Sc. Physics and M.Com., according to the PG prospectus, which says details will be posted on the website. For postgraduate applicants from another board, state or country, the same prospectus says the college itself obtains the eligibility certificate from Madurai Kamaraj University after provisional admission.

For the MBA you need a score in CAT, CMAT, MAT, TANCET or the Consortium test plus a bachelor's degree with 50% marks, and for the MCA a MAT, TANCET or Consortium score with Mathematics at Class 12 or degree level. Those whose scores are strong enough are called in for a group discussion followed by an interview, per the MBA and MCA prospectus, which also asks them to bring the entrance score sheet and, if they studied at another university, an equivalence certificate.

Fatima College publishes no closing marks for any B.A., B.Sc., B.Com. or master's programme: its 2026-2027 prospectuses, admission page and ranking filings carry eligibility rules but no cutoff list. Applicants type their Class 12 or degree marks into the admission portal, and the college announces only who has been provisionally selected, by SMS, e-mail and a list on its website, per the UG prospectus.

One MCA detail is worth asking about. The archived 2020-2021 self-financing fee schedule carries a separate, cheaper "MCA (Govt Quota)" row, Rs 26,000 against Rs 35,500 for the first semester, which shows that some MCA seats were then filled outside the college's own selection. The current MBA and MCA prospectus does not mention a government quota, so check with the MCA department, extension 233 on the contact page, whether any seats this year go through state counselling and, if so, what closing score that counselling published. How full each level runs, a rough substitute for a cutoff, is in the Seat Matrix section below.

Placement is the minority outcome for undergraduates here, and further study is the majority one. In 2024-25, 443 of the 882 undergraduates who graduated on time went to higher studies and 76 were placed, in the college's 2026 filing, and the three earlier batches look much the same.

The undergraduate median sat at Rs 1,80,000 for three batches before rising to Rs 2,16,000 for 2024-25, in the 2026 filing. The on-time graduating batch has also shrunk, from 1015 in 2021-22 to 882, across the two filings.

The master's column tells a different story. Postgraduates are placed at a higher rate than undergraduates, 89 of 444 in 2024-25, yet their median of Rs 1,97,700 came in below the undergraduate median of Rs 2,16,000 that year, in the 2026 filing. These filings mix every programme together, from M.A. Tamil to the MBA, so a single median cannot tell you what your own programme pays.

The training and placement cell page names its recruiters, and the list leans local: Wipro, Tata Consultancy Services, Cognizant and Accenture from Chennai sit beside Madurai employers such as Aravind Eye Hospital, Neeyamo Enterprise and Aparajitha Corporate Services, and a run of schools. The same page gives the placement officer as Mr. H. Vincent. For the professional programmes, the MBA and MCA prospectus lists recent roles at Accenture, TCS and TVS Supply Chain Solutions, but gives no count or salary figure for either programme.

A programme-by-programme seat list is not published. What the college does report is its total sanctioned intake at each level, and it has been rising.

Undergraduate seats have been close to fully taken, and in two recent years more first-years were admitted than the intake figure. The college admitted 1167 against an intake of 1120 in 2021-22 and 1099 against 1060 in 2022-23, having admitted 1179 against 1250 in 2020-21, in the 2026 filing. The filing does not explain the excess.

Postgraduate seats are where room remains. Against 582 sanctioned places, the college admitted 471 in 2021-22, 502 in 2022-23 and 500 in 2023-24, per the same filing, leaving between 80 and 111 master's places unfilled each year. The filing gives these as level totals only, so it cannot tell you whether the empty places sat in aided or self-financing programmes, or which subjects were oversubscribed.

On the NIRF 2025 college list, Fatima College scored 54.39 and took rank 100, the very last numbered slot before the list turns into bands.

The history matters more than the single rank. The college was 27th in 2017, 65th in 2018, 94th in 2019 and 74th in 2020, by its own college profile. It then sat in the unnumbered 101-150 band for four editions, including 2021 and 2024, before returning to the numbered list in 2025.

Among the three Madurai colleges on the 2025 table, Fatima College has the highest Outreach and Inclusivity score, 56.59 against 53.52 for Thiagarajar College and 45.77 for The American College, and the lowest Perception score, 20.47, on the same table. Outreach and Inclusivity rewards access for women and disadvantaged students, and 2,738 of the college's 2,791 undergraduates are filed as SC, ST or OBC in its 2026 filing. Perception, by contrast, is a survey of academics and employers, and that is the parameter holding the total down.

No 2026 rank exists yet. The college has posted the data it submitted for 2026, but the NIRF portal still lists 2025 as its latest released edition.

The college's two current prospectuses disagree on the size of its library. The UG prospectus claims 1,45,000+ books, 98 print journals and access to 46000+ e-journals, while the MBA and MCA prospectus gives 1,39,180 volumes for the same Rosa Mystica Library, so treat the book count as approximate. It seats 412 readers and runs a barcoded, open-access system, per the facilities page. For students with visual impairment the UG prospectus lists Braille materials and talking books, and the MBA and MCA prospectus adds JAWS software.

Hostel

The hostel is for students from outside Madurai district only. The college runs eight blocks on campus, one of them reserved for sportswomen, and does not admit local students, per the hostel page. A college seat does not guarantee a hostel place, you apply separately only after paying college fees, and a few hostel scholarships go to deserving Catholic Dalit and poor students. No hostel fee is published; the hostel office is on 0452 2668257, per the hostel details page.

Spending and Access

Laboratory spending roughly doubled in the latest year on record. New lab equipment took Rs 94,31,300 in 2024-25, against Rs 46,38,253 in 2023-24, and the library's capital budget was Rs 13,20,343, in the 2026 filing. For a wheelchair user, that 2026 return is encouraging: it puts accessible toilets, and lifts or ramps, across more than 80% of the college's buildings, and says walking aids and transport from block to block are provided. Outside the classroom, students can join NSS, NCC, AICUF, Youth Red Cross and the Women Empowerment Cell, per the streams page.

The teaching staff is almost entirely women and mostly doctorate holders. The roster in the college's 2026 ranking filing has 205 entries, 204 of them women, and 181 are marked as currently working. Among those 181, 125 list a Ph.D as their highest qualification, 28 NET and 12 SET.

The rank structure is bottom-heavy. Of the current staff, 132 are Assistant Professors and 45 Associate Professors, with a single Professor, on that roster; the remaining entries are the librarian, the physical directress and the placement officer.

The roster also records movement in 2024-25. It marks 24 people as no longer working at the college, 14 of whom left on 31-05-2025, the end of the academic year, and 21 of the current staff joined in 2024 or later, per the same filing. Most of the leavers were recent arrivals: 14 of the 24 had joined in 2022 or later, on that roster. If you are choosing a department, ask how long its current teachers have been with it.

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