Maitreyi College

A first-year arts student at Maitreyi pays Rs 16,387, of which Rs 180 is tuition and the rest is charges. Roughly two in three of the women on its rolls have come from outside Delhi to a campus in Chanakyapuri whose hostel holds only a little over a hundred of them, so the real cost of a seat here depends as much on where you live as on which course you get. What follows is the money as the college publishes it, the Admission Branch's own allocation score for every one of the thirty programmes it runs, and what its returns say happens to students after they leave.

Maitreyi College opened in July 1967 as a women's college and takes its name from the Vedic sage Maitreyi, as its placement brochure records. It is a constituent college of the University of Delhi, not an affiliated one, which means Delhi University sets its syllabus, conducts its examinations and fills its seats; the college runs 17 departments across science, commerce and humanities from one campus in the Bapu Dham complex at Chanakyapuri, New Delhi 110021.

Two recognitions sit on its masthead, and both are narrower than they look. Its profile records an A++ grade in the second cycle of NAAC accreditation, and Star College status from the Department of Biotechnology that covers the science departments specifically, putting the college, in its own words, among the top 6 in Delhi University to hold that title. On the government's own measure, NIRF 2025, Maitreyi finishes 38th among colleges nationally on a composite of 61.84.

Who studies here is worth reading before anything else. In the data it filed for the 2026 ranking cycle, the college reported 3512 undergraduates, every one of them a woman, of whom 1196 came from within Delhi and 2312 from other states, alongside 4 from outside the country, in its NIRF 2026 submission. Close to two in three students here have moved cities to attend, which turns the hostel section below from a footnote into a planning question.

Maitreyi teaches 18 undergraduate courses and 2 postgraduate ones, M.A. Political Science and M.Sc. Mathematics, and its fee depends on which of three brackets a course falls into rather than on the course itself. What the courses list leaves out deserves a look before what it holds. Four subjects a Delhi University applicant may well be carrying on her CUET card have no honours degree here at all: Psychology, Philosophy, Statistics and Computer Science. Everything below the humanities and commerce honours degrees is science built around five honours subjects plus B.Sc. Life Sciences and Physical Science, and the full roster with its category-wise intake is in the seat matrix further down. Only Political Science and Mathematics run all the way to a master's on this campus.

B.A. (Programme) is a container rather than a course. The same list sets out 13 permitted pairings, each with a major discipline carrying two core papers and a minor carrying one, running from Political Science with History through to Computer Applications with Mathematics. Punjabi appears only inside two of those pairs, and Computer Applications only inside two more, so if either subject is what you want, a pairing is the only route to it and the pairing decides which CUET papers you have to sit.

The published first-year fee for 2025-26 is below, broken into the heads the college actually bills.

Read the tuition line. Of the Rs 16,387 an arts or commerce entrant pays, Rs 180 is tuition and the rest is development, welfare and service charges levied by the college and the University; a science entrant pays Rs 21,340 instead, and almost all of the difference comes from a College Development Fund that jumps from Rs 6,483 to Rs 10,748, in the same fee schedule. Anyone budgeting on the word "tuition" will get this college badly wrong.

That schedule also lets you see the direction of travel, because the college leaves the previous year's table on the same page: in 2024-25 the arts and commerce bracket was Rs 12,855 and the science bracket Rs 16,665, in the same fee structure, so both brackets rose by more than a quarter in a single year. Neither figure is the end of the bill either, because the page notes that the University examination fee is charged separately, later in the year, as and when required. Three other figures matter at the margins, all of them in that fee structure: a foreign student pays Rs 23,958 on top of the course fee, an undergraduate admitted in the Persons with Disabilities category pays Rs 155 in total, and the same category at postgraduate level pays Rs 3,920 against the general Rs 15,675.

An applicant to Maitreyi is choosing between thirty separate queues rather than one college, and that is the fact worth acting on. The 13 B.A. (Programme) pairings are preferenced individually, each carrying its own allocation score, and they sit in the same ordered list as the honours degrees; the round one scores show what that costs a careless list, because Punjabi with History settled at 469.9072 in the unreserved category while Punjabi with Political Science settled at 545.3269. The same subject, two entries, more than seventy-five points between them.

CUET (UG) and the Common Seat Allocation System do everything else. Maitreyi conducts no test, interview or separate application; the allocation itself is made centrally on eligibility, merit, category and seat availability, and the Admission Branch states plainly that the final decision rests with the University and remains subject to verification and compliance. The college's part begins after that, when an allocated candidate turns up with her documents.

Two supernumerary routes sit outside the merit list, and Maitreyi's shape in both is distinctive. The University allotted it 40 sports seats for 2026-27, all for women, across 12 games, and 10 of those 40 are in softball alone, with handball taking 6 and athletics, basketball, fencing, football, hockey, kho-kho, netball, swimming, volleyball and weightlifting sharing the rest, in the college-wise sports seat matrix. Softball is unusual enough at Delhi University that only 7 colleges list it in that entire matrix, and Maitreyi's 10 places are the largest block any of them offers, which is worth knowing if you have played the sport at school. The extra-curricular quota is smaller and broader: 23 seats spread thin across creative writing, three dance forms, debate in both languages, photography, film making, sketching and painting, four music categories, theatre, NCC and NSS, in the college-wise ECA seat matrix. A choreographer, by contrast, has nothing to apply for here, because dance choreography is a category Maitreyi did not take.

A minimum allocation score is not a bar set in advance. It is the CUET score of whichever candidate the system happened to place last in a given programme and category, and it exists only once that round has settled. At Maitreyi in 2026 those scores spanned 812.2525 to 287.037 in the unreserved category alone, and they did not all travel in the same direction as the later rounds ran. Round one in full is below, ordered by the unreserved figure; a dash means the University published no score for that category.

The split in that table is almost clean. The ten highest entries are all B.A. or B.Com. degrees and not one of them settled below 735; the six lowest are four B.Sc. degrees plus the college's two language honours, Sanskrit and Hindi, and not one of them reached 400. The gap barely narrowed as the cycle went on. By the second round B.Com. (Hons.) had eased only to 802.5351 while B.A. (Hons.) Hindi collapsed to 117.7521 and B.Sc. (Hons.) Physics eased to 329.3168 from the 381.6127 it had opened at. A science applicant who missed a Delhi college on her first list has real room here; a commerce applicant does not.

Two later movements are worth planning around, because they run against the usual advice to wait for a lower round. In the third round the only unreserved seat Delhi University reopened at Maitreyi was B.A. (Hons.) Sanskrit, and it settled at 391.4793, above the 348.3685 of round one. At the spot round a single unreserved B.Com. (Hons.) place reappeared and cost 814.7836, more than it had cost in the first round. A late seat at this college is not automatically a cheaper seat.

What genuinely stayed open tells the same story from the other side. Going into the spot round the University listed 14 OBC-NCL, 9 SC, 4 ST and 6 EWS places still vacant in B.A. (Hons.) Hindi, and 5 UR, 11 OBC-NCL, 6 SC, 3 ST and 3 EWS places vacant in B.A. (Hons.) Sanskrit, in the spot round vacancy list. That is 33 unfilled places in one language honours degree and 28 in the other, on a college whose B.Com. (Hons.) entry went into the same round holding a single vacancy, in the same list. Both of the language honours degrees Maitreyi runs were still recruiting at the very end of the cycle; its commerce honours degree was short one student.

Further study, not recruitment, is where most Maitreyi students go, and the college's own returns are what say so. For the class of 2023-24 it filed 650 women into higher study and 302 into jobs, against 1069 who finished the three-year degree on time and a placement median of Rs 5,00,000 a year, in its NIRF 2025 data submission. Higher study beats placement by roughly two to one here, and it has done so in every year the college has reported.

One caution before anyone computes a placement rate from that table. Two of those placement counts, 236 and 302, appear in both of the college's returns but against different graduating cohorts: the 2025 return sets the 302 beside the 1069 who finished in 2023-24, while the 2026 return files it as a 2023-24 placement year belonging to the 1266 who graduated the year before. The newer form separates the graduating year from the placement year and the older one does not, so a percentage built from either table is only as good as the alignment you assume. The 2026 return also adds a year the 2025 one could not: 250 placements at a median of Rs 6,00,000, with 590 going to higher study.

The postgraduate picture is thinner and the college does not disguise it. Of the M.A. and M.Sc. students who completed in 2023-24, 19 finished in the stipulated time, none was placed, and 17 went on to further study, in that same 2025 submission.

Horizon, the college placement cell, publishes a different set of numbers on a different basis. Its 2024-25 brochure reports the highest package of the 2023-24 season at 23.5 LPA from D.E. Shaw, a 20 LPA offer from Xalts behind it, an average of 5.7 LPA, and a highest internship stipend of 50,000 a month. Its annual job and internship fair, Envision 6.0, ran on 21 March 2024 and drew 74 companies, 22 of them recruiting for jobs and 52 for interns; 59 Maitreyi candidates were selected alongside 13 from other institutions, at an average CTC of 4.5 LPA and a highest of 5.6 LPA from Bajaj Capital, in the same brochure.

Who those offers actually reach is the part the brochure shows without stating. It puts the placement batch at 1065 students, 584 of them in arts, 292 in science and 189 in commerce, so commerce is the smallest of the three streams by a wide margin, in the 2024-25 brochure. Every one of the six students the brochure names and quotes about a placement, at Deloitte, PwC, Xalts, Crowe, Arcesium and HCL Tech, came out of B.Com. If you are applying to Maitreyi for Hindi or Botany, the recruitment story on that page is not describing your degree, and the higher-study column in the ranking return is the one to read instead.

The college publishes its seat matrix for 2026-27 course by course and category by category, and the shape of it is worth reading before you order preferences, because the unreserved allocation runs from 93 places down to 15.

Those rows add up to the 1263 undergraduate places the college declared as its sanctioned intake in its NIRF 2025 return, which also records 78 postgraduate places; the seat matrix splits those 78 as 39 each in M.Sc. Mathematics and M.A. Political Science, reserved as per University and UGC norms rather than by a printed category split. B.A. (Programme) is the largest single entry point by a distance, at 93 unreserved places against 47 for the next largest, so a substantial share of each intake arrives on a discipline pair rather than on an honours subject.

Maitreyi is 38th on the Ministry of Education's NIRF 2025 college list, on 61.84 points, and the five components that produced that number pull in opposite directions.

Graduation outcomes is where this college is genuinely strong, and the comparison that shows it is with colleges ranked far above it. Maitreyi's 81.85 on that parameter beats Atma Ram Sanatan Dharm College, ranked 7th on 76.09 overall, which scores 80.14, and Sri Venkateswara College, ranked 11th, which scores 75.02, on the same table. What holds it at 38 is perception at 11.85, a survey of academics and employers that measures name recognition rather than anything that happens in a classroom, and a research score of 49.53.

Read against its neighbours, the rank is close to meaningless as a separator. Ramanujan College sits one place above on 61.85 and Shaheed Bhagat Singh College one place below on 61.55, in the same list, so a hundredth of a point stands between 37th and 38th. If you are choosing between colleges inside that band, the parameter split and the course-wise cutoffs above will tell you far more than the ordinal will.

The department list runs to 17: Botany, Chemistry, Commerce, Computer Science, Economics, English, Environmental Science, Hindi, History, Mathematics, Physical Education, Physics, Political Science, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sociology and Zoology. Thirteen of those own a degree outright, and the mismatch between the list and the prospectus of courses is where applicants get confused.

Computer Science teaches into B.Sc. Physical Sciences with Computer Science and into two B.A. (Programme) pairings, but Maitreyi awards no B.Sc. (Hons.) Computer Science, which is a common assumption and a wrong one. Punjabi is thinner still: it exists only as the minor half of two pairings, behind Political Science in one and History in the other, one core paper against the major's two. Environmental Science and Physical Education appear among the 17 departments and on no line of the degree list at all; their teaching reaches students through the value-addition and skill-enhancement courses that the University's four-year structure makes every undergraduate take from outside her own discipline.

There is a naming trap in this that costs preferences. Delhi University's allocation list writes those two entries as "B.A. Program (Punjabi + History)" and "(Punjabi + Political Science)" in its round one scores, putting the minor first, and it does the same to "(English + Economics)", which the college's own pairings table defines as Economics major with English minor. The subject printed first on the University's list is not reliably the one you will study two papers of, so check the college table before you rank a pairing.

Mathematics and Political Science are the two departments that carry a course all the way through, since M.Sc. Mathematics and M.A. Political Science are the college's only postgraduate degrees. If postgraduate study on the same campus matters to you, those are the two subjects where it exists.

The campus covers 10 acres and is built as three teaching blocks, the Main Building for humanities and commerce, the Old Science Block and a New Science Block that holds a lift, a seminar hall, department museums and the newer laboratories, with 16 science laboratories across the science departments in total, as the college's campus description sets out. Event space runs to an auditorium seating 250, a video conferencing hall for 100 and a seminar hall for 100.

The library is the piece the college has spent hardest on lately. It holds more than 1,03,069 books as on 31 October 2025, with 52 periodicals, 22 newspapers and 678 CDs, on its collection page, and the capital spend behind it more than doubled in a year: Rs 33,14,315 on the library in 2024-25 against Rs 13,66,064 the year before, alongside Rs 53,58,840 on new laboratory equipment, in the college's 2026 ranking return.

Sport is provided for at a scale that explains the softball quota. The campus page lists a baseball and softball field, a netball court, a synthetic basketball court, a badminton court, a football field, a 200 metre grass athletics track and a multipurpose hall used for judo, yoga, powerlifting and chess, with a rock garden and a herbal garden beside them. Accessibility is documented rather than asserted: the college reported lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets in more than 80% of its buildings in its NIRF 2025 submission.

Day-to-day provision sits inside the gate, which matters more here than it would on a college road lined with shops. A Punjab National Bank branch, a bookshop, a photocopy point, a Mother Dairy kiosk and a canteen open from 8 am to 5 pm all operate on the premises, with a doctor available on appointed days and a nurse on all working days, per the campus and food and recreation pages. Student life runs through named societies rather than a generic activity list, among them Abhivyakti in theatre, Nrityakriti and Zeal in Indian and Western dance, Riyaaz and Apollonia in music, Trenchant and Vaachik in English and Hindi debating, Vista in photography, Filmesque in film, Dravya as the finance and investment cell and Meraki as the entrepreneurship cell, on the societies page.

The hostel sits inside the college campus rather than at a University residence somewhere else in the city, which is the most practical argument this college has for an applicant preferencing it from another state. Day to day it is run by a resident warden assisted by the hostel students' union, with a hostel committee chaired by the Principal as the final authority on its rules, per the hostel's own page; the college puts capacity at over 100 outstation students, in its profile.

Set that capacity against the 2312 students from outside Delhi in the 2026 ranking return and the arithmetic is stark: the great majority of outstation students here live in private accommodation, and hostel allotment is a competition, not an entitlement. The criteria are strict about it. Allotment is on merit in the qualifying examination, neither parent may be resident or posted in the National Capital Territory of Delhi, a local guardian in Delhi or the NCR is required, ties are broken first on the distance of the parents' address from Delhi and then on date of birth, and second and third year residents must hold 75% attendance to keep the room. A room won on the sports quota carries one further condition: participation is reviewed periodically, and a resident who stops turning out for her game can lose the hostel seat.

That total is roughly eleven times the first-year course fee for an arts student, and the single largest line in it is not food but Rs 50,000 of hostel operational charges, with mess billed at Rs 37,000 in each of the two semesters, on the hostel fee page. Two conditions on the same page are easy to miss and cost money: the Rs 1,000 admission fee is non-refundable, and the Rs 5,000 security comes back only once the room is vacated and all dues and damages are settled, and only if it is claimed within a year of leaving, after which it lapses to the hostel account. The page also states that hostel charges are revised from time to time, which the course fee page does not say of its own.

Rooms are twin or triple sharing with a few four-bed rooms, semi furnished with a bed, storage, desk, chair and cupboard, and they are not air conditioned; each wing has its own toilet block with geysers and a water cooler on an industrial reverse osmosis supply, and the dining hall seats more than 100, per the hostel facilities page. The mess is run by the residents themselves through a council that sets the menu, closes during the autumn, winter and summer breaks, and allows a rebate of between 5 and 10 days at a time at a charge of Rs 50 a day, capped at 25 days a semester.

The NIRF 2025 return reports a bare count, 198 faculty members entered, and nothing else. The 2026 return is the one to open, because it lists 205 of them individually, each with a designation, a qualification, months of experience, a joining date and whether the post is regular, visiting or contractual.

Read down that roster and three things stand out. It is heavily junior in rank, at 138 Assistant Professors against 48 Associate Professors and 19 Professors, but not junior in credential, since 148 of the 205 hold a Ph.D. It is 166 women to 39 men, so a women's college that recruits men to teach. And it is unusually new: 65 of the 205 joined in 2023, 2024 or 2025, on a staff whose longest-serving member joined in 1982, in that same return. Sixty-five appointments in three years is a fast turnover of who is actually standing in front of a class, and all of it postdates the 2022 accreditation the college advertises.

Teaching is also the overwhelming share of what this college spends. Salaries for teaching and non-teaching staff came to Rs 73,60,57,340 in 2023-24, against Rs 2,36,06,348 on maintaining academic infrastructure and consumables and Rs 1,04,85,901 on seminars, conferences and workshops, in the 2025 return. Because the degree-owning department and the teaching department are not always the same here, look up the staff for both halves of a B.A. (Programme) pairing, not just the one the University printed first.

There is no switchboard at Maitreyi. The college publishes five direct mobile numbers, one per office, and a call to the wrong one will not be transferred, so pick the row before you dial.

Two kinds of number on this page have a shelf life. The course fee moved by more than a quarter between 2024-25 and 2025-26, and every allocation score above belongs to the 2026-27 cycle and will be replaced the moment the next one opens. Take the fee from the college's fee structure page and the scores from the Admission Branch's own list, in that order, rather than from any figure quoted second hand.

At a glance

Quick facts