Tata Institute Of Social Sciences, Mumbai

The entrance test most people still associate with this campus has stopped running. TISSNET was the Tata Institute of Social Sciences' own national exam, and a master's seat at Deonar now turns on a CUET-PG score alone, with three Mumbai degrees selecting on CAT instead. That one change moves the paper you sit, the eligibility bar you clear and the month you have to be ready by.

TISS opened in 1936 as the Sir Dorabji Tata Graduate School of Social Work with a first cohort of 20 students under its founding Director, Dr. Clifford Manshardt, and the institute's milestones record dates the move to the Deonar site, still the main campus, to 1954. The name changed to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1944, and in 1964 the institute was declared a Deemed to be University under Section 3 of the University Grants Commission Act, 1956, as the admissions site sets out. A third status change is recent and shapes how the place is funded: in 2023 TISS became a Grant-in-Aid Institute under the Ministry of Education, which the 2026-27 postgraduate admission brochure states directly, and the same brochure marks 2026 as the institute's 90th year.

Four campuses carry the TISS name, at Mumbai, Tuljapur, Hyderabad and Guwahati, and they are not interchangeable. Each runs its own schools and its own degrees, and everything on this page is about the Mumbai campus. Across all four the institute counted 19 schools, 5 centres and 69 programmes in 2024 on its overview page, and Mumbai holds the largest share of them, including the School of Social Work the institute grew out of.

Mumbai teaches almost entirely at master's level and above. Eleven Mumbai schools and centres run master's degrees on the postgraduate programme list: the School of Social Work with its cluster of specialisations, the School of Health Systems Studies, the School of Habitat Studies, the School of Management and Labour Studies, the School of Education, the School of Law, Rights and Constitutional Governance, the School of Media and Cultural Studies, the School of Development Studies, the School of Human Ecology, the Jamsetji Tata School of Disaster Studies and the Centre for Library and Information Management. Undergraduate teaching at Deonar stops at two degrees, a Bachelor of Social Work and a self-financed Bachelor of Science in Analytics and Sustainability Studies, both carried on the bachelor's fee structure under the Mumbai heading.

TISS does not publish one headline fee for its master's degrees, which is why quoted amounts differ so widely from one listing site to the next. What it does publish are the undergraduate table, the doctoral table and the reduced table for scholarship-eligible students, and together they bracket what a Mumbai year costs. The fee structure for bachelor's programmes puts the Mumbai BSW at Rs 12,000 tuition a semester and Rs 2,43,400 for the whole 2026-2030 degree, including a refundable caution deposit of Rs 10,000. The PhD fee structure published for Mumbai doctoral admissions in 2025-26 sets tuition at Rs 16,000 a semester and Rs 1,77,000 for the full course.

For master's students the only fee table TISS prints is the basic-fee one for SC and ST candidates eligible under the Government of India Post Matric Scholarship, which the postgraduate brochure gives as Rs 8,250 in the first semester and then Rs 1,100, Rs 2,750 and Rs 550. Read that table for what it excludes as much as for what it lists: hostel and dining are charged on top, and the brochure says it does not apply to the self-financing programmes or to B.Ed-M.Ed at all. Everyone else pays semester by semester through the institute's Student Management System on the fee payment schedule, and the same brochure warns that missing that schedule takes a name off the rolls and bars the student from the examinations.

Applying costs money before any of that, and the two admission routes are priced differently. One CUET-PG programme costs Rs 900 in the general category, Rs 600 for OBC (NC) and EWS candidates and Rs 500 for SC and ST candidates eligible under the Post Matric Scholarship, per the postgraduate brochure; the CAT-based admission brochure charges Rs 1750, Rs 1250 and Rs 750 for the same three categories. Bank charges sit on top of both, and neither is refunded under any circumstance.

TISS no longer conducts a national entrance test of its own. TISSNET was that paper, and it has been retired, so there is nothing TISS-run left to register for. In its place the 2026-27 postgraduate admission brochure states that admission to the programmes it lists rests on the CUET-PG 2026 score at 100% weightage, with no extempore reflection test, no group discussion and no online personal interview anywhere in the process. For most applicants that removes an entire interview stage they may still be preparing for.

CUET-PG is conducted by the National Testing Agency, which maps each TISS programme to the subject paper codes that qualify for it, so the paper you sit follows from the degree you want rather than from the campus. The same brochure caps an applicant at three programmes across all four campuses on a single form and cancels every application from anyone who files a second one. The institute opened the current cycle across 46 programmes, per its CUET-PG admissions announcement.

Three Mumbai degrees sit outside that route. The CAT-based admission brochure lists the Master of Hospital Administration from the School of Health Systems Studies, and the MA in Human Resource Management and Labour Relations and the MA in Organisation Development, Change and Leadership from the School of Management and Labour Studies, all admitted on a CAT 2025 score. The weightings differ by programme: MHA shortlists on 95% CAT score plus 5% for academic diversity, which favours applicants holding MBBS, BDS, BAMS, BHMS, nursing, pharmacy or other allied health degrees; HRM and LR uses 97% CAT with 3% for gender diversity; ODCL uses 95% and 5% on the same basis. ODCL additionally requires 24 months of full-time work experience after graduation, counted as on 1 May 2026.

Reservation and the percentile bar work at different stages here, which is where applicants misread the process. TISS publishes a lower shortlisting percentile for reserved categories, but the seats themselves stay undivided until the very end: the CAT brochure applies every reservation rule at final seat allocation through the merit list and waitlist. The reserved shares are 15% for Scheduled Castes, 7.5% for Scheduled Tribes and 27% for Other Backward Classes in the non-creamy layer, with up to 10% for Economically Weaker Sections, and two supernumerary quotas of 5% each sit above them, one for persons with disabilities and one for children and widows of armed forces personnel killed or disabled in action. Selection is not the last step either, since candidates have to appear at the Mumbai campus in person for document verification.

The only admission bar TISS prints in advance sits on the CAT side. The CAT-based admission brochure publishes minimum CAT percentiles for the online assessment shortlist, sectionally and overall, and they are not the same for the hospital administration programme as for the two management ones.

For the CUET-PG programmes no equivalent figure is published ahead of the cycle, because TISS does not rank raw CUET-PG scores. Where a programme accepts more than one eligible subject paper, the institute normalises first. Its FAQ on normalisation gives the method: for each eligible paper TISS takes the all-India score distribution, keeps candidates above the 25th percentile as the qualifying pool, then rescales every score as the candidate's score minus the lowest in that pool, divided by the highest minus the lowest, multiplied by 100. The NTA score itself is never altered; the normalised value exists only to build the TISS merit list. What that means in practice is that your position inside your own subject paper matters more than your raw mark, and the closing number becomes visible only when the list appears.

Merit lists then run in two stages. The CAT brochure describes an Open Merit List built purely on aggregate score with no category applied, after which category-wise lists fill the reserved seats, and a tie is broken on the higher bachelor's degree CGPA. Since each reserved category closes at its own mark, there is no single cutoff that applies across the board.

TISS publishes placement reports school by school rather than one campus summary, and the fullest recent one covers the flagship HRM and LR cohort. The final placement report for the 2024-26 batch records a process run in February 2026 in which 65 students took part and 34 companies made offers. The mean CTC was Rs 28.69 lakh and the median Rs 28 lakh, the highest offer was Rs 66 lakh, and the top 10% of the cohort averaged Rs 49.75 lakh against Rs 40.84 lakh for the top 25%.

The spread matters more than the peak. The placement report puts 51 of the 65 students, or 78% of the cohort, at Rs 20 lakh and above, and records pre-placement offers for 20 of them, 30.77%, taken before the process opened. Consulting drew the largest number of joiners, followed by BFSI and NBFC roles, conglomerates, FMCG and FMCD, manufacturing and IT.

One school's numbers are not the campus average, and the institute's NIRF 2025 submission gives the wider picture across all four campuses: of the 1,321 students who completed a two-year master's in 2023-24, 987 were placed and 308 went on to further study, at a median salary of Rs 8,98,976. If you are weighing a social work, education, public health or habitat studies degree rather than one of the management ones, that is the figure to plan against.

Coverage is also uneven. The placements index carries brochures for the School of Health Systems Studies and the School of Habitat Studies for 2023-25, but the newest School of Social Work brochure on it is 2020-22 and the newest MA Education one is 2020-22 as well, so the two oldest teaching traditions on the campus are the ones with the stalest published numbers. The CAT brochure fills part of that gap differently, listing five years of hospitals and employers for all three of its programmes and attaching a salary to none of them, so you can see who hires an MHA or an ODCL graduate but not what they pay.

Intake is published per programme rather than as a campus total, and the 2026-27 brochures give a number for every Mumbai degree. The CUET-PG programmes appear with their sanctioned intake in the postgraduate admission brochure and the three CAT programmes in the CAT-PG brochure.

Those are the Mumbai numbers, programme by programme. Add the other three campuses and the institute-wide figure on the NIRF 2025 submission is 1,425 seats in two-year postgraduate programmes for 2023-24, plus 45 one-year, 50 three-year and 185 undergraduate. A TISS merit list is overwhelmingly a two-year master's merit list, which is why the two-year seat counts are the ones worth planning against.

TISS appears in exactly one NIRF 2025 list. The university ranking places it 72nd nationally with an overall score of 49.89. There is no management, law or social sciences placing to read beside it, which matters if you are comparing the institute against a private university that enters four separate tables.

That spread has an odd shape for an institute with this research reputation. Outreach and inclusivity leads, which fits a student body drawn largely from outside the state and heavily from reserved categories, while graduation outcomes and teaching resources both sit close behind. The 16.42 for research and professional practice on the university ranking is a score to interrogate rather than accept, because the same institute's NIRF submission reports Rs 33,02,73,724 of sponsored research across 261 projects in 2023-24, Rs 49,85,77,641 of consultancy from 175 projects, and 62 executive and management development programmes that took 4,668 participants. Funded work at that volume is real research activity; it is simply not the kind a parameter weighted toward indexed papers and citations counts well, which is the standing problem for a faculty whose output is books, evaluations and policy reports.

The institute counted 19 schools and 5 centres in 2024 on its overview page, and the schools and centres directory lists them by campus. Reading the directory next to the programme list is the quickest way to see which teaching sits at Deonar and which does not: the School of Rural Development is at Tuljapur, the School of Educational Studies, the School of Gender and Livelihoods and the School of Public Policy and Governance are at Hyderabad, and a second School of Social Work along with the School of Social Sciences and Humanities is at Guwahati.

The main campus has stood at Deonar since 1954, and the milestones record dates the 11-acre Malti and Jal A.D. Naoroji Campus Annexe, which extended it, to 1999. Two connected campus areas rather than one is the practical shape of the place, and which building your school sits in is worth asking before you arrive.

What the NIRF 2025 submission will not give you is a building-by-building answer on disabled access. It reports a bracket instead: lifts or ramps above 80%, adapted toilets above 80%, plus wheelchairs, walking aids and transport from one building to another. On a campus split between the main site and the Naoroji Annexe that bracket is worth pressing on, so ask about the building your own school occupies. Capital spending in 2023-24 went Rs 1,27,78,739 into the library and Rs 4,15,49,252 into new laboratory equipment, plus Rs 2,38,95,840 on engineering workshops and Rs 34,49,581 on studios, the last two being lines that stood at zero in each of the two preceding years. On water and power the same filing lists five kinds of capture, rooftop, surface runoff, percolation pits, recharge wells and storage tanks, together with solar panels and a ban on single-use plastic items.

Student services run through the Office of Students' Affairs, established in 2006, which oversees campus accommodation, health and mental health support and health insurance, anchors the student union and the Wellbeing and Counselling Centre, and coordinates with the Equal Opportunity Centre, the SC and ST cells, the OPEM cell for OBC, PwD, EWS and minority students, and the Women and Gender Development Cell.

The load-bearing words in the TISS hostel line are "subject to availability". The bachelor's fee structure promises Mumbai students a dormitory-type multi-seater hostel on exactly that condition, and the condition should be read literally, because the fallback in Deonar is a Mumbai rent.

For master's students eligible under the Post Matric Scholarship, the postgraduate brochure sets hostel and electricity charges at Rs 18,000 a semester with a dining hall advance of Rs 20,000 a semester, the advance adjusted against actual consumption. Doctoral scholars pay Rs 20,000 a semester on the PhD fee structure and, unlike master's students, hold the room for the full year instead of paying daily charges to stay through the vacation. No general-category master's hostel rate is published on the admissions site, so confirm it with the Admissions Helpline before you build a budget around it.

Headcount is the one faculty figure TISS puts on a public record. There are 275 of them entered in its NIRF 2025 submission, carried on a 2023-24 salary bill of Rs 1,85,94,85,266 covering teaching and non-teaching staff together. The three-year run of that line says more than the single number does: Rs 1,40,40,79,421 in 2021-22, Rs 2,08,68,72,106 in 2022-23, then the fall to 2023-24. The dip lands in the year after TISS moved onto grant-in-aid funding, which is worth carrying into any conversation about how a specialisation here is staffed.

Doctoral supervision takes a large share of that teaching. The doctoral registers on the same submission hold 346 full-time and 193 part-time scholars to 2023-24. Awards that year split 70 full-time and 39 part-time, and the part-time column reads zero for both of the years before it. Prof. D. P. Singh is Chancellor and Prof. Badri Narayan Tiwari the Vice-Chancellor, as the institute's homepage shows.

TISS keeps no ranked list of famous alumni. Its Office of Alum Affairs posts individual achievements instead, and two of those are checkable at source. Urmi Basu, from the 1984-86 MA in Social Work, founded New Light India and holds the Nari Shakti Puraskar. Meera P R, from the batch of 2017-2019 in the MA in Social Work in Community Organisation and Development Practice at Mumbai, took an All India Rank of 160 in the UPSC Civil Services Examination, 2022. Other names circulate on listing sites without appearing on that official record, so they are left off here rather than repeated.

The change to watch sits on the CAT side. For 2027-28 admissions, four programmes will select through CAT 2026 rather than three: the MA in Human Resource Management and Labour Relations, the MA in Organisation Development, Change and Leadership, the Master of Hospital Administration and, newly, the MSc in Analytics, which moves off the CUET-PG route. The admissions announcement also states that the IIMs have no role in the selection or in running these programmes, which corrects a common misreading of any CAT-based admission.

Two things from the current cycle are worth noting alongside it. The institute held its 86th convocation on 22 August 2026, per the announcements on its homepage, and it published a public FAQ setting out the CUET-PG normalisation method after applicants queried how their scores were being compared across subject papers.

The comparison people get wrong most often is TISS against TISS. Tuljapur, Hyderabad and Guwahati are separate campuses with their own schools and degrees, and the CUET-PG form lets a candidate name up to three programmes across all four. What it does not allow is a move afterwards: the CAT brochure states that inter-programme and inter-campus movement will not be permitted once a student is admitted to a particular programme. A Hyderabad public policy seat and a Mumbai social work seat are two separate decisions, not rungs on a ladder, and the campus on your form is the campus you get.

Comparing TISS with other Indian universities is harder than it sounds, because it files in one NIRF category and no other. Any like-for-like reading has to happen on the university ranking, where it sits 72nd, and a management, law or social sciences placing quoted for TISS anywhere is not a NIRF placing, because TISS enters none of those tables.

The campus sits on V.N. Purav Marg in Deonar, in the eastern suburbs of Mumbai, and the admissions office runs programme-specific helplines alongside the general one.

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