St. Aloysius

St Aloysius has been teaching in Mangaluru since 1880 and has been a university since 2024. Its 2025 national ranking moved the wrong way while its score moved the right way, it prices the same seat differently depending on where the candidate comes from, and it selects on its own one-hour online test rather than on a board percentage. Applications for 2026-27 were judged on Class 11 finals and Class 12 mid-terms, months before any board result existed.

St Aloysius (Deemed to be University) is the Jesuit institution on Light House Hill in Mangaluru, and it became a university recently enough that most of its published record still says college. The Ministry of Education declared St Aloysius College (Autonomous) a deemed-to-be university in 2024; the same institutional record dates the founding to 1880 in a rented bungalow at Kodialbail, autonomy to 2007 and the fourth NAAC cycle to 2023, per the university's history and milestones page. The All India Council for Technical Education's approval letter puts the same address plainly, Light House Hill, Kodialbail, Mangaluru 575003, and classifies the institution type as Deemed to be University (Pvt) with year of establishment 1880, in its 2025-26 extension of approval.

The name is shared, and that is the first thing to get straight. The university's own site lists St Aloysius Institute of Technical Education, St Aloysius PU College, St Aloysius High School and St Aloysius Gonzaga CBSE School as separate institutions under the same Jesuit management, on its home page. A pre-university seat, a school seat and a degree seat here are three different admissions at three different institutions, and this page is about the degree-awarding one only.

Teaching sits on two campuses. The main one at Kodialbail carries the arts, science, commerce, law, education and engineering schools; the AIMIT centre carries the MBA and MCA, and its own AICTE record gives its year of establishment as 1999 and its address at Mangalore 575022, in the 2025-26 approval for MBA and MCA. One consequence follows a management applicant around: the MBA is not taught at the address in the photographs, but out at Madoor village in Kotekar, under a different pincode.

Fees here are published programme by programme and category by category on a signed sheet, so the cost of a degree is a number you look up rather than ask for. Undergraduate teaching runs across arts, science, commerce, management, computer applications, vocational studies, law and, since 2025, engineering. The first-year sheet for 2026-27 prices every combination separately in five columns, Karnataka, non-Karnataka, NRI, SAARC and foreign.

Read down the Karnataka column and it starts at Rs 25,000 for several three-subject B.A. combinations and reaches Rs 2,28,000 for B.Tech in computer science and engineering, with one industry-embedded B.C.A. priced above even that, on the same undergraduate fee sheet. Three additions catch people out. Second-language choices are billed on top, at Rs 7,500 for additional English, Rs 7,000 for Malayalam and Rs 8,000 for French. The four B.Tech programmes and the two law programmes each carry an examination fee charged separately from the tuition line. And BBA, BCA and B.Sc. Data Science entrants who did not take maths or statistics in II PUC pay Rs 4,000 for a compulsory basic maths or basic accountancy class.

Postgraduate pricing is steeper and much wider, and the non-Karnataka premium at this level is smaller than the undergraduate one. M.A. Kannada (Professional) is billed at Rs 40,000 against Rs 45,000 for a non-Karnataka candidate, while the MBA and its fintech and business-analytics variants are billed at Rs 3,00,700 against Rs 3,05,700, per the postgraduate first-year sheet for 2026-27.

Examination fees for postgraduate courses are extra on that sheet too, and the later years are priced on separate documents, so the first-year figure is the entry cost and not the course cost. Both sheets, along with the second and third-year schedules and the refund policy, sit on the university's fee structure page.

Selection has three parts and the marks you apply with are not your board results. Undergraduate admission for 2026-27 is based on the marks obtained in the first PU or Class 11 final examination and the second PU or Class 12 mid-term examination, and the decision combines that previous academic performance with the SAU-ET and an interview, per the guidelines for undergraduate applicants. Applying therefore happens months before the board result exists, which is why a strong mid-term matters more here than at a college admitting on a final percentage.

The SAU-ET is the university's own entrance test. It runs online for one hour, carries 50 multiple-choice questions covering general knowledge, aptitude, English and subject-oriented material, and the 2026-27 sittings were scheduled to begin on 5 January 2026, on the same applicant guidelines. Its 50 questions split into 10 on English, 10 on general knowledge, 10 on aptitude-based reasoning and 20 on the chosen programme's subject, and every applicant sits it, NRI and foreign candidates included, per the university's admission FAQ. Candidates who clear it are called for an interview with the admission committee, told by email or WhatsApp at least two days ahead, and the student and a parent or guardian must both attend with the documents.

Three practical points sit in the same document and cost people seats. The programme fee has to be paid on the day of the interview, and failure to pay within the stated time cancels the admission. Applicants from outside Karnataka, and international applicants, need an eligibility certificate obtained through the university website after securing admission. And students admitted to B.Com., BBA, BCA, B.Sc. (Data Science) and B.Sc. (Animation and Visual Communication) may need a laptop, which belongs in the budget alongside the fee. Admitted students can ask the Office of Admissions for a recommendation letter for a bank loan against the original fee receipt. Every admission stays provisional until the qualifying board marks card is produced and the originals are verified, and the admission FAQ gives 15 June 2026 as the opening date of the academic year.

The university refuses the state rank outright, and says so in as many words: asked whether a CET score is accepted, its admission FAQ answers that CET is not considered and that admission runs only through SAUET. Every undergraduate seat is filled on the applicant guidelines instead, which rest admission on previous academic performance, the SAU-ET and the interview together, so no state authority publishes a category-wise closing rank against this name and there is no number to hit. Nor does the university turn its own test into a public merit list: its announcements page posts semester results, revaluation outcomes and a Ph.D. entrance test result, and no undergraduate selection list at all. The one set of percentage bands the university does print applies to money rather than entry: its Vidwath Spoorthi merit scholarships open at 95% and above for B.Com. and BBA, 90% for BCA and B.Sc., and 85% for B.A. and B.Voc., on the admission FAQ. Those are scholarship thresholds, not admission ones, and a candidate below them is not shut out. A real entry threshold, if one is ever set, would surface as a programme-level notification on the admission portal at the time of the offer, so treat any single "cutoff percentage" quoted for this campus elsewhere as somebody's estimate rather than a published figure.

The undergraduate placement numbers here are small, and the reason sits in the same table: far more of this cohort goes on studying than goes out to work. The 2023-24 exit cohort ran to 1,481 undergraduates finishing in stipulated time; 115 of them took a job at a median of Rs 2,50,000 a year while 549 moved into higher studies, close to five times as many, per the institution's NIRF 2025 data submission.

At postgraduate level that pattern turns over. In 2023-24, 826 postgraduates finished in stipulated time, 555 were placed at a median of Rs 3,25,000 and only 144 went on to further study; the two years before it recorded 641 placed at Rs 4,00,000 and 595 placed at Rs 3,85,000, in the same submission. Read the two levels together and the bachelor's degree looks less like an exit than a staging post, with the hiring showing up one degree later. The degree that gets hired here is the second one. At both levels the median rose in 2022-23 and then fell back below where it started, which is worth setting against any recruiter list.

Who does the hiring is published without a year attached. The university's placement page names the companies its students went to and the number selected at each, led by TCS's business-process arm at 32, Northern Trust at 26 and the Goan Institute of Communicative English at 23, with the assurance practice of Ernst & Young at 21 and KPMG, Wipro, Infosys, Mphasis and Syngene behind them. That list carries no cycle label, so use it to read the sectors rather than to size a year.

Two authorities set an intake here and they cover different programmes, so the seat count a candidate needs depends on which degree they want. The AICTE's extension of approval dated 5 April 2025 governs the technical side, fixing the 2025-26 intake for the four engineering degrees at 60 each and approving BCA at 310 and BBA at 360 seats, in the engineering, BBA and BCA approval letter. The management programmes at the AIMIT centre are approved separately, at 240 MBA seats and 120 MCA seats, unchanged from the previous year, in the MBA and MCA approval letter.

Everything the AICTE does not touch is set by the university's own Executive Council, and published. Notification SADU/EC/2024-25/07 of 10 May 2024 approves 200 places in B.A., 350 in B.Sc. and 670 in B.Com. for 2024-25, alongside 320 in BBA and 310 in BCA, and it goes on to fix a postgraduate intake programme by programme, 60 for the MSW, 30 apiece for M.Sc. chemistry, biotechnology and biochemistry, 20 for M.Sc. mathematics and 15 for M.Sc. bioinformatics, in the approved intake notification linked from its intake and faculty disclosure.

One clause at the foot of that notification changes what every figure above it means. The Council resolved to add a 20% supernumerary provision to all programmes except the MBA, MCA, BBA and BCA, granted BBA and BCA a 10% supernumerary quota instead, and ruled out any supernumerary quota for the MBA and MCA. An approved number is therefore a floor across most of the campus and a hard ceiling only at AIMIT, and the admissions actually recorded for 2024-25 show that working: 779 students entered B.Com., 344 entered BBA, 339 entered BCA and the MBA took 139, in the university's total intake return. Read those against the 670, 320 and 310 approved in the same intake notification and the overshoot is exactly where the supernumerary quota allows one. The MBA meanwhile carries two different approved numbers for the same year, 180 in the Council's notification and 240 in the AICTE's MBA and MCA approval letter, and neither document explains the other.

What is genuinely not published is the layer below the programme. A B.A. is approved as 200 places in that same intake notification, not as a quota per three-subject combination, so a candidate fixed on one combination still has to ask the admission office what that combination opens. At the far end of the scale the institution-wide filing gives the totals: 1,954 undergraduate places and 875 postgraduate places sanctioned for 2023-24, against rolls of 5,803 undergraduates and 1,701 postgraduates, of whom 2,463 and 789 respectively came from outside Karnataka, per the NIRF 2025 data submission.

The 2025 result is the interesting one, because the score went up and the rank went down. St Aloysius scored 57.17 for rank 73 in the College category of the 2025 National Institutional Ranking Framework, against 55.57 for rank 58 in 2024 and 53.87 for rank 80 in 2023. The score has risen in each of those three years and the rank has not, so the institution's own trend and its position on the table now say different things.

Teaching, learning and resources carried the gain, rising from 63.88 to 71.13, with outreach and inclusivity up from 70.64 to 73.09. Perception went the other way, from 28.09 down to 18.64, the weakest of the five parameters and below where it sat in 2023, and research and professional practice slipped to 20.21. An applicant choosing on the strength of a research supervisor should weigh that last column more heavily than the rank. Note also that the institution entered the College category rather than the University one in 2025, under its former name, which is why national college tables still list it as St. Aloysius College.

Departments were reorganised into schools when the university status arrived, and the school is now the unit that owns a programme.

The School of Engineering is the newest and the smallest, with four undergraduate programmes and no postgraduate layer yet, per its school page.

The library is the asset with the longest record and the one worth visiting before you decide. Started in 1880 with the college itself, it moved into the newly built Centenary Building during the 1979 to 1980 celebrations, across three floors with seating for nearly 250 readers, and it now holds more than 1,85,000 volumes including an archive of nearly 25,000 historical works, regional literature and manuscripts, among them a rare 1618 edition of the Christa Purana, per the university's library page. The personal collection of George Fernandes, an alumnus and former Defence Minister of India, was added in 2013 and strengthened the social sciences holdings. The University Library alone carries more than 1,00,000 print volumes and runs on Koha with RFID; a separate Dewang Mehta postgraduate library was set up in the Maffei Block on 30 August 2003 and holds more than 25,000 books.

The campus carries the pieces a 145-year-old Jesuit institution accumulates rather than a modern build-out: the chapel with the Moscheni frescoes completed in 1901, the Aloyseum museum, an Olympic-standard swimming pool inaugurated in 2016, the Mother Teresa Peace Park, the Al-Vana arboretum and the Radio Sarang community radio station, listed and dated on the milestones page. For recruitment specifically the university reports 200 dedicated systems, seven auditoriums seating 200 to 500 and four air-conditioned conference rooms on its placement page.

Residence is priced as one annual figure covering both bed and board, which makes it easier to budget than a room-type ladder. The hostel fee for the academic year is Rs 85,000 for food and accommodation including water, electricity, room rent and maintenance, collected as Rs 10,000 to reserve a seat from 1 April, Rs 50,000 before joining and the balance of Rs 25,000 within three months, per the university's hostel page.

Two conditions matter to an outstation applicant. Half the hostel seats are reserved for students from socially and economically weaker sections, and the ladies' hostels are managed by the Sisters of Charity under a warden drawn from their ranks, on the same page. Capacity is finite against a roll of several thousand, so confirm a place at the point of admission rather than after it.

How many people teach at St Aloysius depends on which document you open, and the two that exist are nowhere near each other. The university entered 430 faculty members in its NIRF 2025 data submission, and that number stands alone in the return, with no student-faculty ratio, cadre ratio or doctoral-qualification breakdown beside it. Its own disclosure counts 292 and does break them down: 20 professors, 40 associate professors and 232 assistant professors across its schools, in the total intake and faculty return. Read across that table and the teaching weight sits where the enrolment does, with B.Com. the largest single department at 29 teachers and computer application next at 25. The professorial grade is the thin one, and a candidate looking for supervision rather than instruction should notice that fewer than one teacher in ten holds it. The nearest thing to a research profile sits on the School of Engineering page, which puts over 40 faculty members in research areas including computer networks, deep learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, natural language processing and image processing, and attributes that count to the institution rather than to the school itself. The same page names Dr Ruban S as Dean, with Dr Geetha M Pinto and Dr Glenson Toney as associate and assistant deans. For any other school, the department pages on the university site are the only route to a named supervisor.

The alumni record is unusually broad for a single campus, and the university names it on its own milestones page: Justice K.S. Hegde, later Speaker of the Lok Sabha; George Fernandes, whose library came back to the campus; Justice Santosh Hegde, former Lokayukta of Karnataka; K.V. Kamath, the banker who went on to chair the BRICS bank; K.K. Venugopal, who served as Attorney General of India; Aravind Adiga, the Booker Prize winner; Anant Agarwal of edX; the conservation zoologist K. Ullas Karanth; and the cricketer K.L. Rahul. The list leans towards law, banking and public life rather than any single professional stream, which fits an institution whose oldest faculties are arts and commerce.

The most telling recent item is procedural. The Office of the Registrar held the First Convocation Ceremony of St Aloysius (Deemed to be University) on Saturday 1 August 2026 at the Loyola Auditorium, for eligible postgraduate and B.Ed. graduates, with registration through Alumni Connect having run from 25 June to 14 July 2026, per its convocation announcement. A first convocation is what a two-year-old university looks like from the inside.

Around it the campus calendar is running the newer schools hard, with the School of Engineering hosting a national conference and a student-clubs inauguration, and the university running Kalothsava and an Aloysian Fest that the same events page also records as postponed. Examination timetables, revaluation notices and results are posted on the announcements page, which is the page to watch during a cycle rather than any aggregator.

Within Karnataka the comparison is short. Four colleges from the state reached the top 100 of the NIRF 2025 College table, and three of them are in Bengaluru.

That makes St Aloysius the only one of the four outside Bengaluru, and the highest-placed college on the table from coastal Karnataka.

Against the other Mangaluru institutions a student is likely to be weighing, the comparison is not like for like. The district's best-known deemed universities are health-sciences campuses, where a seat turns on a NEET rank fed through a centralised counselling round; this one takes no external rank at all and refuses CET scores outright on its admission FAQ. The real trade is between a broad arts, science and commerce campus with a long teaching record and a specialised professional campus with a narrower exit.

The main campus is in the middle of Mangaluru at Kodialbail, off Light House Hill Road, and the management centre sits at a separate address at Kotekar.

At a glance

Quick facts