S.b. College, Changanacherry-686 101

St Berchmans College puts its whole first-year fee schedule on one signed page, and the widest gap on it separates two degrees taught on the same campus: BA Malayalam at Rs 14,115 for the year against Rs 25,000 for the new BA (Hons) in International Relations and Public Policy. The same sheet carries a second column for Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe and Other Eligible Community candidates, and that concession is worth Rs 4,035 on either degree, which is close to a third of the Malayalam fee and about a sixth of the honours one. The college is also placed 56th among all Indian colleges in the government's NIRF 2025 ranking, 13 rungs above where the same framework put it a year earlier.

The college is the oldest higher education institution of the Archdiocese of Changanacherry and it has been teaching on the same ground in Changanassery, in Kottayam district, since 1922. Its own centenary account fixes the opening date: Bishop Mar Thomas Kurialacherry opened the institution on 19 June 1922, twenty five years after Monsignor Charles Lavigne laid its foundation stone in 1895, with a junior intermediate class of 125 students and Rev. Mathew Purackal as first principal. Degrees are awarded by Mahatma Gandhi University, Kottayam. Everything upstream of the degree, the syllabus, the examinations, the results and the rank lists, is settled here, because this was the first college in Kerala to secure autonomous status, in 2014.

Three older marks of standing sit behind that. The college is recognised under sections 2(f) and 12(B) of the UGC Act 1956, was identified by the UGC under its College with Potential for Excellence scheme in 2004, and was granted minority status by the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions in 2010. The teaching side grew in long steps rather than a rush: undergraduate programmes from 1927, postgraduate from 1957 and research programmes from 1986.

One practical warning before you search for anything about this place. The institution answers to at least four written forms of its own name. Its website heads every page St. Berchmans College Changanassery, the Ministry of Education listed it as St Berchmans College (Autonomous), Changanacherry in the 2025 ranking and as S.B. College, Changanassery in the 2024 one, and the town itself is spelled Changanassery, Changanacherry and Changanasserry across documents the college signed in the same year. A file belongs to this college only if it names Changanassery or Kottayam.

Read the fee order for your exact programme, because the spread across it is wider than the college's reputation for cheap aided teaching suggests. It was signed by the Principal on 6 April 2026 for the undergraduate side and 16 April 2026 for the postgraduate side, and it prices the first year only.

What drives that last block is a single line on the sheet, not the tuition. Tuition is Rs 1,300 on every undergraduate programme the college runs, honours degrees included. The charge that separates them is one further head that reads Rs 3,500 on the older programmes, Rs 5,385 on BSc Psychology and Rs 13,885 on each of the two new honours degrees. Because the reserved-category column waives only the government fee component, that Rs 13,885 is payable by every applicant to the honours programmes whatever their category, and the concession they receive is the same Rs 4,035 a BA Malayalam student receives on a fee two thirds smaller.

Postgraduate pricing runs on the same skeleton and lands in a tighter band, apart from the management programme.

Two rows on that order stop halfway. MSW and MBA carry a government fee component of Rs 5,665 and Rs 31,805 respectively and no annual total at all, the MBA figure being driven by a tuition charge of Rs 28,100 against Rs 2,310 on every other postgraduate programme. The management degree runs through the Berchmans Institute of Management Studies, which keeps its own placement and corporate relations office and its own fee payment channel, so ask that office for the full MBA cost rather than reading it off the college sheet.

The teaching catalogue behind those fees is broad and shallow by design. The Principal's own account counts 17 undergraduate, 19 postgraduate and 3 MPhil programmes, with nine departments offering doctoral programmes and five programmes sponsored by the UGC, two of them B.Voc degrees. The B.Voc pair covers Renewable Energy Management and Industrial Chemistry, and the science stream now includes BSc Biotechnology and Botany, BSc Industrial Microbiology and Zoology and a BCA alongside the single-subject degrees.

Applications come to the college, not to a state allotment process, and the calendar has two halves. In the 2026 cycle the college set a closing date of 15 June 2026 for undergraduate applications and 10 June 2026 for postgraduate ones, then reopened for spot admissions later in the year with a last date of 3 September 2026. If you are reading this after the June window, the spot round is the only door left, and it is announced on the homepage rather than mailed to applicants.

Selection runs on an index mark the college computes from your qualifying examination marks. What is unusual is that it shows its working before it commits: it publishes a provisional list per programme and invites you to argue with it. The 2026 postgraduate list carried the instruction plainly, that it was only a provisional rank list to verify application status and index marks, with corrections to be filed through a Google Form on the instruction page of each list before 12:00 PM on 13 June 2026. That is a narrow window and it is the one chance to catch a mark the office keyed wrong.

The postgraduate lists are drawn separately for each programme, and there are seventeen of them, including three chemistry lists for MSc Chemistry, MSc Polymer Chemistry and MSc Analytical Chemistry and two physics lists for MSc Physics and MSc Physics (NRE). Applying for chemistry here means choosing which of the three you want to be ranked in, not entering one queue.

Two numbers to call rather than email during an admission month: the college office on 09961231314 and 0481 2420025, and the admission line the 2026 cycle published for spot admissions, 9544641122. The self financing programmes run through a separate office on 9544200075, which is the number to use if your programme is one of the newer ones.

There is no closing index mark to give you for 2026, and the reason is worth stating exactly. The college does publish rank lists, per programme and per category, and it published them this year. It also takes them down. The postgraduate rank list page still lists all seventeen programmes as headings, but the files behind them have been cleared, and the undergraduate rank list site for the same cycle now loads with nothing attached. Nothing is archived on the college site, so an index mark from a closed round cannot be recovered from a public page.

That leaves one honest instruction. If you want to know what an index mark had to be, ask the department during the admission window while its own list is up, and download the PDF the day it appears rather than the week after. The list you are looking at in June is the only version of it that will exist.

Changanassery publishes its outcomes twice over, once as a cell's promotional total and once as a signed government return, and the two cannot be reconciled. The signed version comes first here: every figure in the next two tables was filed against institute code IR-C-C-11831 for NIRF 2025 and NIRF 2026. The Placement Assistance Cell's own number is taken up at the end of this section.

Two lines in that table move in opposite directions. The median salary of a placed undergraduate has risen in every cohort filed, from Rs 3,34,000 for the 2021-22 batch to Rs 3,84,000 for 2024-25, while the number placed has not: 176 in the newest cohort against 183 in the one before it, out of a batch more than a hundred students larger. What absorbed the difference is the last column. In 2024-25 more than twice as many graduates registered for further study as took a job, and that has been the shape of every cohort the college has filed. A BA or a BSc here is ordinarily a step to a master's degree, a professional qualification or a state examination, and the placement percentage describes a minority of the year.

The postgraduate return reverses it.

A master's degree from Changanassery turns into a job far more often than a bachelor's from the same campus. The 2024-25 return puts 199 of 466 postgraduates in work against 176 of 653 undergraduates, and the earlier filing shows the same gap in each of the three cohorts before it. The postgraduate median has stayed ahead throughout, though the distance is closing: Rs 4,36,000 against Rs 3,34,000 for the 2021-22 batch, Rs 4,55,000 against Rs 3,84,000 for 2024-25.

The Placement Assistance Cell publishes a different kind of claim on its own page: that more than 1300 students including MBA students were placed between its establishment in 2020 and 2024, and a recruiter list running from South Indian Bank, Federal Bank and HDFC Bank through KPMG, Deloitte, Ernst and Young, TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro, Accenture and UST Global. That total counts offers across every level and every year together, so it is not a substitute for the cohort table above and cannot be divided into it. Use the recruiter list for who visits and the filings for how many convert.

The college does not publish a programme by programme seat table, so what follows is the sanctioned intake it reports to the Ministry, which is the only figure with an official source behind it.

That middle column is the change a current applicant is living inside. The three year undergraduate line went to zero in 2024-25 and the entire sanction, 856 seats, moved onto a four year line that had never carried a student before. If you are starting an honours degree at Changanassery now you are starting a four year one, and the college has not yet had a four year cohort finish: its 2026 filing enters zero graduates, zero placed and a median salary of zero on every four year row, which is honest bookkeeping rather than a bad outcome. No placement figure on this page describes the degree you would actually be joining.

Seats also go unfilled, and more of them at undergraduate level than at postgraduate. Against a first year undergraduate intake of 836 in 2022-23 the college admitted 718, and against 836 in 2021-22 it admitted 676. The postgraduate side fills tighter, admitting 495 of 503 in 2022-23 and 485 of 533 in 2023-24. The spot admission round the college opens each September exists because of that undergraduate gap.

Rank 56 is a recovery, not a plateau, and the five year record shows what moved.

The research column is the durable gain. It nearly doubled between 2021 and 2023 and has held near 70 since, which is a high figure for an aided arts and science college and the single reason this one outranks better known Kerala names. The columns that swing are teaching and perception. Perception fell to 1.07 in 2024 and came back to 6.34 in 2025, and the teaching score lost ground across three cycles before recovering all of it in one. A drop of 15 places in 2024 followed by a rise of 13 in 2025 is what a college looks like when its underlying work is stable and its scoring inputs are not.

The state's own ranking reads the same college very differently. The Kerala State Higher Education Council placed it 10th among Kerala colleges in KIRF 2025 on a score of 57.855, with 84.76 for teaching, learning and resources. That teaching score is more than 20 points above what the national framework awarded in the same year. Two Indian government rankings scoring the same institution in the same year cannot both be describing teaching the same way, and a student comparing colleges should treat either number as a ranking artefact rather than a measurement of the classroom.

For the longer view, the college's own records put it at 46 in NIRF 2018 and note that 2,746 colleges took part in the 2023 edition, in which it finished 54th.

Departments here are split into an aided group and a self financing group, and which side yours sits on changes the office you deal with and the fee sheet you pay from. The aided list runs across Botany, Business Administration, Chemistry, Commerce, Economics, English, Hindi, History, Malayalam, Mathematics, Physical Education, Physics, Political Science, Psychology, Sanskrit, Sociology, Social Work, Statistics, Syriac, Zoology, International Relations and Public Policy and Artificial Intelligence and Data Science, while the self financing side carries Biotechnology, Business Administration, BBA, Commerce, MCA, Computer Science, Library and Information Science, Microbiology and Biochemistry, Renewable Energy and Applied Sociology.

Chemistry is the department to understand if you want to know why research is the strongest column the national framework gives this college. It describes itself as the pioneer of chemistry education in Kerala, running two undergraduate and three postgraduate programmes plus MPhil and PhD work, with 17 permanent and 3 adjunct faculty and more than 150 papers in Scopus indexed journals. Its own milestones read like the college's expansion in miniature: BSc Chemistry in 1951, MSc in 1964, MSc Analytical Chemistry in 1984, a research centre in 1996, MSc Polymer Chemistry in 1999, a DST-DAAD centre of excellence with Germany and MPhil Environmental Chemistry in 2002, DST FIST support in 2006 and BVoc Industrial Chemistry in 2015. The department also runs a water and soil quality testing laboratory and a rubber latex analysis laboratory open to the general public, which in a rubber growing district is a working link to the economy around the campus rather than a display.

The library is the one facility the college quantifies instead of describing. It moved into a five storey building in 1973 and now holds 142,228 books, subscribes to 157 journals and periodicals and carries four databases, DELNET, N-List, EBSCO and Prowess IQ. Its special collections are the part worth a visit if your subject is a language: Syriac, Hermann Gundert, Madhavikutty, Durrell, Gandhian Studies and Braille collections are held separately from the general stacks. Spending on it has been flat rather than rising, at Rs 21,69,489 of capital expenditure in 2024-25 against Rs 21,99,048 the year before, while laboratory equipment took Rs 42,03,781 in the same year.

Two buildings on the campus came out of UGC grants and are still the largest pieces of shared infrastructure. The Mar Charles Lavigne Indoor Stadium covers 1,671 square metres, holds four wooden floor badminton courts with floodlights, one basketball court and two volleyball courts, and has a seven step gallery seating 2,000. The Common Instrumentation Facility has run since 2007, built with the money that came with the College with Potential for Excellence tag, and is shared across every science department by teachers and research scholars rather than owned by one of them.

For the humanities the equivalent is the Ulahannan Mapilla Centre for Oriental Studies, endowed in memory of a Malayalam teacher by his own students and friends, which runs an air conditioned seminar hall, a library and a reading hall with four research guides and sixteen research students attached, and holds an annual researchers meet at which eleven selected participants from across Kerala present papers. Around those sit a herbarium, a botanical garden, a zoological museum, a language lab, a research block, a campus television unit and Christ the King's Chapel.

Nothing on the college's facility pages addresses disabled access. It is described once, on a three question block of the government form, and two of those three answers are bands: wheelchairs, walking aids and transport between buildings are provided outright, while lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets are each recorded in more than 80% of buildings. The form does not say which buildings fall outside those bands. The office can name them for a single department over the phone, and that is the call to make before a seat is accepted.

Residence at Changanassery is the sharpest imbalance on this page. The college lists six hostels for men, St Thomas, St Berchmans, Sahrudaya, St Joseph's, St Thomas Moore and Pope John Paul II, and one hostel for women, St Mary's, each with a named warden and a mobile number.

Set that against who is actually enrolled. In the 2024-25 return the roll splits by programme structure, not evenly. The three year undergraduate cohort now being taught out is 969 men against 383 women, while the four year programmes replacing it are 476 women against 216 men and postgraduate teaching is 680 women against 313 men. Six houses were built for the population leaving this campus and one for the population arriving on it. A woman applying from outside Kottayam district should treat accommodation as the binding constraint on her application and call the St Mary's warden before she calls the admission office, because no room rates, no capacity and no waiting list are published anywhere on the college site.

Every teaching post is named in a public government filing, which is a far better source on this subject than any page the college writes about itself. The college entered 169 faculty members in its NIRF 2025 return and 179 in the 2026 one, which prints the whole roster: every teacher by name, with gender, qualification, months of experience, joining date, and whether the post is regular or adhoc and contractual. Its own centenary account described about 170 teachers and 80 non teaching staff across 18 departments serving roughly 3,200 students, which is the order of magnitude to hold in mind.

Staff pay is where nearly all the money goes and it is rising steadily: Rs 24,54,13,198 in 2024-25, Rs 23,32,52,875 in 2023-24 and Rs 21,63,53,116 in 2022-23, several times every other operating line put together. The useful thing about the roster for an applicant is narrower than any of that. Find your own subject in it, count how many entries hold a doctorate and how many are marked contractual rather than regular, and you will know more about the teaching you would get than the college's overall figures can tell you.

The century of names this college claims is unusually political for an arts and science institution. Its centenary account records that it has produced two Chief Ministers of Kerala, Oommen Chandy and P.K. Vasudevan Nair, along with the writers and artists Muttathu Varkey, Vishnu Narayanan Namboothiri and Prem Nazir, and Justice Syriac Joseph, C.V. Ananda Bose, Raju Narayana Swami, Jancy James and B. Ekbal. The same account opens with V.V. John, later Vice Chancellor of Jodhpur University, enrolling in the first junior intermediate class in 1922.

The academic line is separate and easier to verify against a department. Chemistry lists among its own graduates Dr K.M. Abraham at Northeastern University, Dr Kuruvilla Joseph at the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Dr Santhoash Babu at NCL Pune, Dr Bibin John at VSSC and Dr Linda Thomas at SCTIMST. The alumni association is organised into geographic chapters, and the Kochi chapter is headed by Padma Shri Dr Philip Augustine. Every name above is taken from a page the college or one of its own departments wrote about its own graduates, with no external verification attached to any of it, which is the ordinary standing of an alumni claim and worth holding in mind before it counts for anything in a decision.

The college keeps a news feed and it is genuinely current, but it is built of headlines rather than articles. Late August 2026 carried entries for the Millennium Fellowship, a Viksit Bharat programme, a Chemistry Association inauguration and an Independence Day competition, most of them a title and a photograph with no body text. Alongside them the site runs recruitment notices, including applications invited for a permanent post of office attendant.

One caution about the site itself. The scrolling notice bar at the top of every page still carries examination notifications from 2021 next to the current admission deadline, so a notice being on screen is not evidence that it is live. Check the date on the item before you act on it.

Inside its own state this is a mid table standing rather than a leading one. Five Kerala colleges finished ahead of it in NIRF 2025 and twelve behind, out of the eighteen the state placed in the top 100.

The two colleges directly above it, St. Thomas College at Thrissur on 59.19 and Govt. College for Women at Thiruvananthapuram on 58.99, sit inside a single point of its score. A separation that narrow tells a family nothing, and it will not survive the next cycle. The comparison that does hold is local. Within Kottayam district the other ranked college is CMS College Kottayam at 86 on 55.58, nearly three points behind, and the nearest colleges in Changanassery town itself, Assumption College, N.S.S. Hindu College and St Joseph's College of Communication, are not in the top 100 at all. If you are choosing where to study without leaving the taluk, this is the ranked option.

The campus sits in Changanassery town in Kottayam district, and almost every office publishes its own line rather than routing through a switchboard.

The postal address is St. Berchmans College, Changanassery, Kottayam 686101, Kerala. Examinations are handled by an office that answers to the college rather than to Mahatma Gandhi University, which is a direct consequence of autonomy and the reason a query about a mark, a revaluation or a certificate goes to the Controller of Examinations here and not to a university campus in another town.

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