Most of what a family needs to decide can be decided now. Most of what they are waiting for — this year's fees, this year's dates, this year's cut-offs — will not exist until the colleges and authorities publish them, which happens later than anyone would like.
This page separates the two, so you can get on with the first while waiting for the second.
Three ways into a private college
Through a centralised counselling process. You sit a qualifying exam, an authority ranks you, you fill choices, and it allots a seat. The exam and the counselling are usually run by different bodies, and the difference matters:
- KCET — the state entrance test for engineering and other professional courses. The exam and the Karnataka counselling that follows it are both run by the Karnataka Examinations Authority (KEA).
- NEET-UG — the national qualifying exam for medical and dental courses. It is conducted by the National Testing Agency (NTA). KEA does not conduct it. What KEA runs is the Karnataka counselling — the state-quota seats and, under the agreement notified for the cycle, the private and NRI shares in private colleges; the Medical Counselling Committee (MCC) runs the All India Quota counselling and all seats at deemed universities.
- COMEDK — its own test, run by a Karnataka consortium of private colleges. The COMEDK test itself is for engineering only. The consortium also runs counselling for architecture and planning seats at member colleges, but on other exams' scores — NATA or JEE Paper 2A for B.Arch, and, as the consortium has notified, JEE Paper 2B for B.Plan, with its detail to follow. If architecture is the target, COMEDK's own paper is not the exam to register for.
Through the college's own process. Deemed and private universities run their own entrance tests or admit on qualifying-exam marks. This is where most non-professional courses are actually filled — commerce, management, arts, science, design. It does not extend to MBBS and BDS, which are admitted on NEET rank through counselling at every college that offers them.
CUET sits slightly apart: it is a national test conducted by the NTA, not a college's own paper, but several private and deemed universities here accept it for their own admissions.
Through an institutional category. Management quota, NRI, or lateral entry. Different eligibility, different price. There is a guide to those routes and the one others sell alongside them.
The exams that matter here
Twenty-four different entrance exams are accepted across the Bengaluru colleges on this site. The ones that come up most, by field: KCET, COMEDK, CUET, JEE Main and NEET-UG at undergraduate level; CAT, MAT, XAT, CMAT and GMAT for postgraduate management; GATE for postgraduate and doctoral study, and PGCET — which is KEA's entrance for Karnataka's postgraduate management, computer-application, architecture and engineering seats, not engineering alone; NEET-PG for postgraduate medicine; CLAT and LSAT—India for law; NATA for architecture; and UCEED, CEED, NID DAT and NIFT for design. Several colleges also admit on a test of their own; two are held here as named exams — Christ's, and Amrita's AEEE. Separately, DCET is KEA's entrance for lateral entry into the second year of an engineering degree. It is the route to ask about if you hold a diploma. Where a college accepts it, that appears in the eligibility printed on the course's own page. Not every exam here has a page of its own; where one does not, the college's own course page still names it.
One score often reaches more than one college, and a college often accepts more than one score. Each exam page lists which Bengaluru colleges accept that exam, and which courses they admit through it.
What you can settle now
- Which courses exist, and where. Every college page lists the courses it runs, at every level, with specialisations named where the college states them.
- Eligibility, where the college publishes it. 72 of the 162 do.
- Which routes are open, where the college publishes them. 118 of the 162 do. Per course, not per college — a route open on one course at a college is often closed on another.
- Which entrance exams to register for. The decision with a real deadline attached, and the one most often left too late.
- What a course costs, where a fee can be cited. We can cite a fee for 86 of the 162 colleges we hold — published by the college, or notified for it by KEA or COMEDK — and 84 of those 85 have at least one figure whose source states its year. Where nothing can be cited, the page offers to find it out for you rather than estimating.
What does not exist yet, and why
2027-28 fees. Most colleges publish the coming year's fee close to the admission window. The figures on this site are the most recent each college has published — many are 2026-27, some are older, and some documents carry no year at all. A figure from a past year is a good guide to scale and a poor guide to the exact number; an undated one is weaker still, and we would rather you saw that than assumed.
2027-28 dates. Announced by the authority or the college. When one is published we show it, and we can tell you when to expect one.
Cut-offs. We show none. The closing ranks on record either name no year and round or do not come from the counselling authority, and a rank without its year is a wrong decision about a child's year. Counselling cut-offs are released by the authority after each round. We publish no predictions.
The sequence that works
- Now: shortlist courses, not colleges. The course decides the exams, the routes and the eligibility.
- Now: check eligibility honestly against what each college publishes. A shortlist you are not eligible for is a shortlist of nothing.
- Next: register for the entrance exams your shortlist needs. Registration windows close regardless of readiness.
- When published: compare 2027-28 fees as they appear, against the 2026-27 figures you already know.
- At counselling: the choice list. Order matters more than length.
The part that is genuinely hard
Everything above is a sequence you can follow yourself, and many families should. The information on this site is free, it is sourced, and for a family with a clear direction it is enough.
The difficulty is not finding facts. It is that the facts are fragmented across 162 colleges, different by course, different by route, different by category, different by academic year, published at different times, and sometimes not published at all. A parent assembling that picture for the first time is doing in three months what a professional does continuously — and doing it while the deadlines run.
And at the end of the assembling, the questions that actually matter are not factual:
- Which of these colleges should genuinely be on the list, and which are there out of habit?
- Which routes does this child meet the published eligibility for, on this budget?
- Is a management seat worth what it costs, set against what the alternative would cost?
- What does the full four years cost, not the first year?
- What is the plan if the first choice does not come through?
- When is it right to wait, and when is waiting the expensive option?
That is what we do. Tell us the child's stage, the courses under consideration and the budget, and we will go through what each college and authority has published — the eligibility, the routes, the categories, the fees and the allotment data the authorities themselves release — and tell you what it rules in and out for you, what it will actually cost, what order to do things in, and where the risk sits.
What we do not do. We do not predict a rank, a cut-off or a chance of admission. No cut-off for 2027-28 exists yet, and a prediction dressed as one is the most expensive thing a family can be given. Where a number is not published, we offer to find it out.
Sometimes the answer is that you have this in hand and should carry on without us. We would rather say so than take a fee for confirming what you already knew.
Our service fee is separate from anything payable to a college. It is quoted before we start, it does not change with which college you choose, and no college pays us anything. That independence is the reason our opinion on a college is worth having.
This page is not a promise of admission to any institution.
The counts on this page are as at 2026-09-22 and come from our own records, which change as institutions publish.