University Of Mysore, Mysore

Among India's state public universities the University of Mysore is placed 20th in the NIRF 2025 tables, and that is the ranking worth quoting rather than the 71st it takes on the wider university list. It is an affiliating state university founded in 1916 whose undergraduate degrees are mostly taught in other people's classrooms and whose postgraduate degrees are taught in its own departments. What no listing site explains is that the same master's degree here carries two prices, decided by which of two admission schemes lets you in: the university's own fee sheet puts an M.Com. at Rs 25,615 in year one under the first and Rs 75,000 under the second.

This is a state public university that has been shrinking its map for sixty years while growing its departments. It was established on July 27, 1916, is the sixth oldest in the country and the first in Karnataka, and was founded through the efforts of Nalvadi Krishnaraja Wadiyar IV and the then Diwan Sir M. Visvesvaraya. The same page records that it was granted autonomy in 1956, that its territorial jurisdiction originally covered nine districts of Karnataka, and that the creation of Bangalore University in 1964, Mangalore University in 1980 and Kuvempu University in 1987 reduced it to the four southern districts of Chamarajanagara, Hassan, Mandya and Mysuru.

The map moved again in this decade, and the university's own affiliation directory is where you see it. That directory lists the Mandya, Hassan and Chamarajanagara district college lists as de-affiliated from the University of Mysore from the academic year 2021-22, and the law colleges as de-affiliated from 2009-10. Only the Mysore district list is still live. Read that against the overview page, which still describes 228 affiliated colleges, and the two do not describe the same institution. If your college is in Mandya, Hassan or Chamarajanagara, check whose name goes on your degree before you assume it is this one.

Teaching in those districts did not stop, which is the part the de-affiliation notice does not say out loud. The university runs postgraduate campuses at Manasagangotri in Mysore, Hemagangotri in Hassan, the Sir M. Visvesvaraya Postgraduate Centre in Mandya and the Dr. B. R. Ambedkar Post Graduate Centre in Chamarajanagara. The colleges left; the university's own classrooms in three of the four districts stayed. Alongside them sit the constituent colleges: Maharaja's College, Yuvaraja's College, the University College of Fine Arts, the University Evening College, Government First Grade College at Terakanambi in Chamarajanagar district, General Bipin Rawat First Grade College at Hethur and Government First Grade College at Halli Mysuru, both in Hassan district.

The main campus is unusually green for a city university. Manasagangotri was named by Kuvempu, a former Vice-Chancellor and the first Jnanpith awardee, and covers 739 acres containing the Kukkarahalli lake, which extends to an area of 261 acres. Mysuru itself is about 140 kms south west of Bengaluru, which matters mainly because a weekend commute home is realistic for most Karnataka students and an interview trip is a half-day, not a flight.

Scale, in the university's own count: 85 PG departments offering more than 150 postgraduate programmes, more than 1,20,000 students across UG, PG, M.Phil and PhD, 39 recognised research centres, 138 outreach and research centres, 23 specialised programmes and 131 national collaborations. Five faculties carry all of it: Arts, Humanities and Social Science, Commerce and Management, Education, Law, and Science and Technology.

Start with the split, because it decides your bill before your marks do. Postgraduate admission here runs under Scheme-A and Scheme-B with different fee structures, and the gap between the two is not a surcharge, it is a different order of money. The fee sheet for 2026-27 prices the first year of each programme twice.

Two things fall out of that table. An M.A. in English is Rs 13,317 one way and Rs 69,500 the other, so a family budgeting from a listing site's single figure can be wrong by a factor of five. And the cheap end is genuinely cheap: at Rs 13,317 for the year, a taught master's at a NAAC-accredited university costs less than one semester at most private colleges in the same city.

Professional programmes sit at their own level and are admitted elsewhere. The same sheet prices the first year of the MBA at Rs 83,952 and of the MCA at Rs 55,952 under Scheme A, the LL.M. at Rs 40,326, M.Tech. in Materials Science at Rs 66,145 and M.Tech. in Computer Cognition Technology or Computer Science and Technology at Rs 69,990.

Year two is cheaper across the board, because the one-time heads drop out. Under Scheme A the second year of most M.A. programmes comes to Rs 10,674, of the M.Com. to Rs 22,792 and of the MBA to Rs 32,674, so budget the two-year total rather than doubling the first-year number.

Where your bachelor's degree came from adds a third price. The sheet carries two further columns for students of another university outside Karnataka, adding Rs 16,911 and Rs 9,309 on top of the Scheme A total, which takes the M.A. group from Rs 13,317 to Rs 39,537 and the M.Com. from Rs 25,615 to Rs 51,835. Foreign nationals and NRI candidates are priced on a separate schedule again, and a foreign national holding a foreign degree also pays Rs 6,325 for the Functional English Speaking Course.

Small print worth knowing before you write the cheque. The fee sheet's notes record that SC and ST students admitted under Scheme A whose parents' annual income is Rs 2.50 lakh and below get full fee concession through the Social Welfare Department, and that a student who fails to receive that benefit must remit the prescribed fee in full. Under Scheme B the full fee is payable to the concerned account, SC and ST students under the same income ceiling may apply for it through the State Scholarship Portal, and SC, ST, OBC and general merit students above that ceiling are allowed two instalments for the tuition fee. The concession is a reimbursement you apply for, not a discount at the counter.

Undergraduate teaching under this university's name happens mainly in its constituent and affiliated colleges, and the university's own direct undergraduate offer is narrow: its School of Planning and Architecture runs B.Arch. over 5 years, B.Tech. Planning over 4 years and M.Arch. over 2 years. Separately, the university sells online BCA, B.Com., BBA, MCA, M.Com. and MBA degrees through a portal of its own, which is a different product from the campus programmes priced above.

The rule that catches most applicants out is that there is no marks-only route into a taught master's here. The admission notification for 2026-27 states that an entrance examination is compulsory for all postgraduate degree programs for all candidates except foreign nationals, and that candidates have to apply and appear for entrance examinations separately for each course. Four clusters are spared the repetition: a single common paper covers Group 1 of Zoology, Botany, Bio-technology, Micro Biology, Genetics, Sericulture and Seri Biotechnology, Bio-chemistry and Molecular Biology; Group 2 of Ambedkar Studies, Buddhist Studies, Social Justice and Empowerment, Co-operative Management, Development Studies, South Indian Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, Folklore, Jainology and Prakrit, West Asian Studies, Peace and Conflict Resolution, Women's Studies, Rural Development and Public Administration; Group 3 of M.Com. and M.Com. Financial Services; and Group 4 of M.Sc. Chemistry and Organic Chemistry. Everything else is a paper of its own, and each paper is paid for separately at Rs 1,200 for a single subject and Rs 2,400 for a group. Apply to four unrelated departments and the application bill alone is real money.

Not every programme is admitted by this university at all. The notification sends candidates for M.B.A., M.C.A. and M.Tech. to the Karnataka Examinations Authority, B.Arch. through NATA conducted by the Council of Architecture and M.Arch. through the Post Graduate Entrance Test in Architecture. Undergraduate applications to the constituent and affiliated colleges are filed on the Karnataka government's Unified University and College Management System, not on the university's own portal.

The arithmetic of selection is published in full, and it is half your degree and half the test. The admission guidelines state that the total marks scored in the cognate subject in the qualifying examination is reduced to 50%, that entrance marks are retained as they are where the test is for 50 marks and halved where it is for 100, and that the overall score is the sum of the two. A weak entrance paper cannot be rescued by a strong degree, and the reverse is equally true.

Three merit lists are prepared, not one. The guidelines require separate consolidated merit lists in descending order of overall score for candidates holding the qualifying degree from the University of Mysore, for candidates from other universities within Karnataka, and for candidates from universities outside Karnataka. Ties are broken on the percentage in the cognate subjects first, then non-cognate subjects, then the aggregate including languages, and only then on the final-year marks in the same order.

Allotment then runs in a fixed order that starts with everybody. General merit seats are allotted first, considering candidates on the consolidated merit list irrespective of category or reservation claim; only then do Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, Category I, IIA, IIB, IIIA, IIIB, Kalyana Karnataka, Defence, Differently-abled, Kannada Medium, other universities within Karnataka and other universities outside Karnataka follow, in that sequence. Several of those claims carry conditions people miss. The Kannada Medium quota is open only to University of Mysore candidates who studied 1st to 10th standard in Kannada medium. The Defence quota is one seat in each programme, ranked through a published order of priority that starts with serving personnel and works down through their children, spouses and wards, and it does not reach children of civilian employees of defence establishments. The Divyangjan claim needs a locomotor disability of not less than 50% certified by a person of the rank of Professor in Orthopedics in a government medical college or hospital, and blind candidates are not eligible for programmes involving experimental work. Claims under Transgender, Kashmiri Migrant and Destitute categories are processed by the Registrar rather than by the department.

One reservation rule here behaves differently from the rest and is worth reading twice if you applied under it. Unfilled seats in Categories I, IIA, IIB, IIIA and IIIB move to general merit, and Kalyana Karnataka vacancies move to general merit, but vacant SC and ST seats are interchangeable only with each other, cannot be transferred to any other category, and may instead be given to SC and ST students from other universities within Karnataka. Commerce is admitted on its own track: M.Com. and M.Com. Financial Services are selected through a merit cum counselling process at the Department of Studies in Commerce on a separate calendar.

Scheme B is not a parallel application. The guidelines state that admission under Scheme B follows the same procedure as the casual round for Scheme A, against the seat matrix given for Scheme B, and the calendar of events puts it last: Scheme A admissions ran 25-08-2026 to 27-08-2026, special category admissions on 28-08-2026, Casual Round I from 29-08-2026 to 31-08-2026 and the Scheme B round for university departments and constituent colleges from 01-09-2026 to 03-09-2026. In practice you take the higher fee because the subsidised seats ran out before your rank came up.

One last clause decides whether a programme runs at all. The notification warns that a postgraduate program will be offered only if at least 10 candidates are admitted, and that candidates in a programme falling short must be prepared to shift to another related programme against an available vacancy or cancel their admission, except in the case of languages. Before you pick a thinly subscribed specialisation, ask the department how many it admitted last year.

There is a real closing score here, published department by department, and it is not a percentage band. The university puts out a provisional selected list for each programme carrying every selected candidate's overall score and the seat type they took, so the lowest score that took a general merit seat is a matter of public record rather than of guesswork.

The spread inside a single column is the useful part. Chemistry took its top general merit candidate at 94.13 and its last one at 61.79, while Psychology's general merit block ran only from 94.00 down to 82.92. Same university, same year, same test format: one department is genuinely hard to enter and the other is not, and a campus-level cutoff would hide both facts.

Match your score to the right column, though, because the general merit block is not always the top of the page here. Since candidates from other universities are ranked on separate consolidated lists of their own, a strong outsider never appears in the general merit run at all: M.A. English selected a candidate from another Karnataka university at 85.75 against the 76.53 that led its own general merit block. Which list your degree puts you on decides which of those numbers you are actually chasing.

Now the thing the allotment order actually does to a list. In M.A. Political Science, every one of the general merit seats went to a candidate carrying a reserved category tag, from IIA and IIIB at the top through Category I, SC, ST and IIIA further down. That is the rule working as written rather than an anomaly: general merit is allotted on score alone, so a strong reserved-category candidate takes a general merit seat and leaves their own category seat free for someone below them. If you are estimating your chances, do not assume the general merit block is a general-category block.

The floor beneath all of this is fixed and low. To be considered at all a candidate must qualify in the entrance test by scoring a minimum of 08 marks for SC, ST and Category I candidates, 09 marks for OBC candidates and 10 marks for others, out of 50. Clearing that qualifies you for the list; it does not come close to getting you a seat in Psychology.

The audited count is the one the university files with the ranking framework, and for the class of 2024-25 it is better than its ranking suggests. Its NIRF 2026 submission records that of 2,783 two-year postgraduate students graduating in the minimum stipulated time, 1,959 were placed at a median salary of Rs 5,12,000, with 502 going on to higher studies. That median moved a long way in one year: the same filing shows Rs 3,80,000 for the 2023-24 cohort, from 1,983 placements among 3,186 finishers.

Read the top row against its own denominator and that is the honest headline: most of the students who finished a two-year master's inside the stipulated time were recorded as placed. Read the bottom row and the law school is the tightest performer on campus, with 38 of 42 LL.M. finishers placed at a median of Rs 3,42,000, though on a median that sits below the general postgraduate figure.

Those audited totals are the whole of the published record. The University Career Hub is the only placement-facing page this university runs, and its description of a skill development centre, a design hub and an incubation centre is the extent of it: no company names, no highest package, no department-wise or year-wise breakdown anywhere on it. Any recruiter logo wall attached to this university's name on a listing site is not coming from the university. Since each department admits its own cohort here rather than a central cell doing it, who interviewed last season is a question for the department office, and worth asking before you choose between two of them.

Seats here are counted twice over, once for each scheme, and the Scheme B column is the one that tells you how likely you are to end up paying the higher fee. The 2026-27 statement of intake for the Manasagangotri campus fixes both.

Roughly a third of every programme's places sit on the expensive side of the fee sheet, which is why the scheme question is not academic. The reservation split inside the Scheme A column is fixed by the state and printed on the same sheet: SC 15%, ST 3%, Category I 4%, IIA 15%, IIB 4%, IIIA 4%, IIIB 5%, general merit 42% and Kalyana Karnataka 8%, which is the whole hundred. Everything above that hundred is supernumerary: 10% each for candidates from other universities within and outside Karnataka, 5% for Differently-abled candidates, and further places for Defence, Kannada Medium, Transgender and Kashmiri Migrant applicants. Added together those blocks are why the grand total for M.Com. reaches 110 against a Scheme A intake of 84, and the two other-university quotas are much the largest of them, so a Mysore degree is worth more here than the headline intake suggests.

Some departments carry earmarked places that never reach the open pool. The same sheet reserves five seats in M.A. Co-operative Management for candidates deputed from the co-operation and allied departments of the Government of Karnataka, eight in M.Tech. Urban and Regional Planning for deputed government candidates, and five in MBA Agri-Business at the Institute of Development Studies exclusively for overseas students, while 15 additional M.Sc. Bio-Technology candidates are selected through GAT-B conducted by the Regional Centre for Biotechnology.

Across the whole institution, the sanctioned intake it declared for 2024-25 was 2,865 in two-year postgraduate programmes, 172 in one-year postgraduate programmes, 360 in four-year undergraduate programmes and 180 in five-year undergraduate programmes. The shape of that list is the shape of the university: postgraduate first, by a wide margin.

The two national tables that carry this university disagree about it, and the difference is the ranking pool rather than the institution. It holds rank 20 with a score of 58.00 on the NIRF 2025 State Public University list and rank 71 with 49.98 on the wider University list, where private deemed and central universities compete for the same places. Both numbers are accurate. Only the first one measures this university against institutions funded and governed the way it is.

The profile is consistent on both lists and it is lopsided in a way an applicant should price in. Teaching and graduation outcomes score in the high seventies to low eighties; research and perception sit in the twenties on the state list and lower still on the national one. Put plainly, this is a place that teaches large cohorts to completion and is not, on this evidence, a research-reputation buy. If your reason for coming is a PhD pipeline rather than a taught master's, weigh the 29.74 on research and professional practice more heavily than the headline rank.

A warning about the university's own pages, because they will mislead you. Its home page still says it is ranked 19th in the India Rankings 2021, its milestones list records 44th position in NIRF 2023, its awards page reports ranks of 33 in the University category and 54th overall for 2022, and its postgraduate admissions site prints 36th in the India Rankings 2017. None of those is the current figure. The awards page also adds a Karnataka State Universities Rating Framework result, printed there as 04 star rating.

Teaching is organised into five faculties covering Arts, Humanities and Social Science; Commerce and Management; Education; Law; and Science and Technology, and the department list underneath them is long enough that the entrance notification reads like a catalogue: Master of Arts courses running from Ambedkar Studies and Ancient History and Archaeology through Kannada, Philosophy and Urdu, Master of Science courses from Anthropology and Applied Geology through Sericulture and Zoology, Master of Library and Information Science, M.Tech. in Materials Science and in Urban and Regional Planning, M.Com. and M.Com. Financial Services, MBA in Agri Business, M.Ed., M.P.Ed., B.P.Ed. and LL.M. in Constitutional Law and International Law.

Alongside the departments sit named institutes that carry much of the distinctive work, including the B. N. Bahadur Institute of Management Science, the Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, the Oriental Research Institute, the Institute of Development Studies, Gandhi Bhavan, the Directorate of Distance Education, the School of Planning and Architecture, the School of Law, the School of Foreign Languages, the Centre for Women Studies and the Centre for the Study of Social Inclusion.

External recognition is department-level, not campus-level, and it is the sharpest available guide to where the research money goes. The Department of Science and Technology has recognised Botany, Bio-Technology, Microbiology, Physics, Sericulture and Statistics under its FIST programme, while the UGC's Special Assistance Programme covers Bio-Chemistry, Bio-Technology, Chemistry, Commerce, Computer Science, Earth Science, Food Science and Nutrition, Journalism and Mass Communication, Library and Information Science, Mathematics, Physics, Political Science, Statistics, Zoology and the Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies. A candidate choosing between two departments here has a better signal in that list than in any campus ranking.

The library is the asset that most distinguishes this campus from a newer state university, and its scale is the reason. Mysore University Library holds a total collection of more than 1.2 million items and is open from 8am to 8pm, and its Digital Information Resource Centre runs 270 PCs with internet browsing, opens from 9am to 7 pm and takes an average of 500 users a day.

Accessibility here is unusually well equipped and unusually well documented. The library's Visually Challenged Resource Centre carries Sara and Angel book readers, Plex Talk, Prixma and Topaz magnifiers, a Bonita mouse, a Braille printer, a graphic embosser, JAWS talking software, Duxbury Braille translation software, Kurzweil OCR reading software and a refreshable Braille display, with similar facilities on a smaller scale in the Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, the University College of Fine Arts and the University Graduate Library, and a separate Learning Resource Centre for physically challenged users adds a foot pedal mouse, a mouth stick mouse, a five finger typist and a Tactic touch pad mouse emulator.

The buildings have not caught up with those centres, and the university's own NIRF return says so with a qualifier rather than a yes: lifts or ramps and specially designed toilets are each reported in more than 80% of buildings, alongside walking aids, wheelchairs and transport from one building to another. Across an estate this spread out the missing fraction is the part that decides a day, so the question to put to the department is not whether the campus is accessible but whether that block and the route from it to the PG library are.

Research infrastructure is concentrated rather than scattered. The university lists a Central Instrumentation Centre at Vijnana Bhavan, an animal house and a Drosophila stock centre in Zoology, a green house in Biotechnology, manuscripts held at the Oriental Research Institute, and museums for folklore at the Jayalakshmi Vilas Mansion and for botany, zoology and earth science in their respective departments. Vijnana Bhavan itself came out of a single grant: recognition as an Institution of Excellence brought Rs 100 crore in 2008 and built a core instrumentation facility housing NMR, NGS, LCMS, XRD, imaging and cell culture.

Everyday amenities on campus include auditoriums, an open air amphitheatre, a bank and ATM, a post office, museums, a book store, the Srikantadatta Narasimha Raja Wadiyar cricket stadium and a swimming pool. Water is the one estate question this campus answers in full, which is no surprise for a university built around a lake: the same return ticks rooftop harvesting, surface runoff harvesting, percolation pits, recharge wells and storage tanks, every capture type the form offers. The rest of that block is thinner, running to solar panels, composting systems and a ban on single-use plastic items.

Hostel places exist and are applied for as part of the admission cycle rather than afterwards: the postgraduate admissions portal carries a dedicated hostel admission application, which opens alongside the selection lists. Treat it as a deadline, not a formality, because it closes with the rest of the round.

Beyond that application, this is the thinnest published area on the entire campus. The university's hostel manual is linked from the student menu on every page of its own website as a scanned document with no readable text, so no bed count, no block list and no monthly mess or room charge is published anywhere a family can plan against. Neither the 2026-27 fee sheet nor the admission notification carries a hostel head. Until the university publishes a legible schedule, the only reliable figure is the one the hostel office gives you on the phone, and it is worth asking for it in writing before you accept a seat that assumes a bed.

The teaching roster is large and its composition is the fact worth knowing. In the faculty details of its NIRF 2026 submission the university entered 466 members, of whom 411 are marked as currently working with the institution; the year before it had entered 438 faculty members.

Set the two halves of that table against each other and the pattern is exact. Every one of the 280 lecturers is entered on adhoc or contractual terms, and the 186 regular posts are the professor, associate professor and assistant professor grades. More than half the people teaching here hold no permanent post, which affects continuity more than quality: a contractual lecturer with a doctorate and a decade on campus is a good teacher on an insecure contract. The practical question for an applicant is who takes the core papers and supervises dissertations in their department, and that is answerable from the department's own faculty page.

Research capacity sits with the regular grades and it is substantial. The same filing records 404 full-time and 592 part-time doctoral students to 2024-25, with 149 full-time and 223 part-time doctorates awarded in that year, against 97 sponsored projects from 62 funding agencies worth Rs 56,56,75,773 in 2024-25 and 14 patents published and 12 granted in calendar 2024. Its own count of published output puts the overall Web of Science h-index at 42 across 3609 publications since 1986.

No list of graduates is published by this university that can be checked against a primary record, and the names circulating on listing sites arrive without one. What its own pages do document is who taught and led here. The main campus was named Manasagangotri by Kuvempu, a former Vice-Chancellor and the first Jnanpith awardee, and the university's online degree portal records that Dr S. Radhakrishnan, later President of India, was a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Mysore. Both belong to the faculty story rather than the alumni one, and the distinction matters if you are weighing a claim someone made in a brochure. Until the university publishes a roster of its own, no graduate names appear here.

Everything binding during an admission year is a dated PDF on the postgraduate admissions portal rather than an announcement anywhere else: the admission notification, the instructions for filling applications, the calendar of events, the final key answers, the consolidated merit lists, the programme-wise selection lists, the special category eligibility lists and the hostel application all appear there. The university's own site carries the rest, and its news and notification feed runs to tenders, circulars and examination notices.

Treat the first date you read as provisional, because in this cycle it moved. The notification dated 29.06.2026 set the last date for filing the entrance application at 18.07.2026; the calendar of events, reissued a month later under a column headed Present Date, carries 23-07-2026 instead. The published sequence around it is the web portal opening on 01-07-2026, entrance examinations on 31-07-2026 and 01-08-2026, applications for admission from 10-08-2026 to 17-08-2026, departmental verification closing on 22-08-2026 and the consolidated merit list on 24-08-2026. Anyone planning for next year should watch that portal from June and re-check every date against the latest calendar rather than the notification it came from.

Set against the Karnataka institutions NIRF puts in the same pool, this one comes first. The NIRF 2025 State Public University ranking places it 20th with 58.00, ahead of Bangalore University at 26 with 57.04, the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore at 37 with 53.21 and Visvesvaraya Technological University at 50 with 50.28. Those four are the only Karnataka names on a table that stops at 50 places nationally, so the accurate claim is the narrow one: of the Karnataka state universities NIRF ranks, this is the best placed. It is not evidence that the state has only four.

The picture inside Mysuru itself is different, and it is the comparison a local applicant actually faces. On the wider university list JSS Academy of Higher Education and Research, also in Mysuru, sits at rank 21 with 60.00 against this university's 71st with 49.98. It is not a like-for-like pair: JSS Academy does not appear on the State Public University table at all, its subject mix is health sciences, and its fees are set on a different basis entirely. Comparing them on one number tells you very little; comparing what each teaches, and at what price, tells you the whole thing.

The administrative address is the one to use for anything binding, and the admission lines are separate from it.

Crawford Hall is the administrative seat in the city; the teaching campus is Manasagangotri, and the two are not the same address. Mysuru is about 140 kms south west of Bengaluru and well connected by rail, road and air.

At a glance

Quick facts