UGC Allows Students To Pursue Two Degrees Simultaneously, Finalises Guidelines

Bhubaneswar: Students will be able to pursue two full-time academic programmes in physical mode from the academic year 2022-23.

While the University Grants Commission (UGC) had been planning such a move for a long time, it received a go-ahead for it in 2020 and the guidelines were finalised and made official on Tuesday. The guidelines will be put up on the official website of UGC on April 13 and will apply to all the programmes available across the country.

Students can either choose a combination of a diploma programme and an undergraduate (UG) degree, two master’s programmes, or two bachelor’s programmes across domains such as sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and a wide variety of disciplines. The two degrees could be completed either in physical classroom mode, one online and one offline, or both in online mode.

Earlier, the UGC regulations did not allow students to pursue two full-time programmes and they could only pursue one full-time degree along with online/short-term/diploma courses.

The programme will now allow students not only to enrol in two physical programmes simultaneously but also pursue two academic programmes, one in full-time physical mode, and another in open and distance learning mode. They can also join a programme in a physical mode in a university, along with another programme in an online mode. The third choice for students is that they can pursue two online degrees simultaneously.

Students can pursue two academic programmes simultaneously in physical mode either from the same or different universities.

If a student is eligible to pursue a postgraduate (UG) degree and also wants to enrol in a bachelor’s degree in a different domain, he/she will be able to pursue a UG and PG degree simultaneously. The class timing for both the programmes must not clash.

“In the last commission meeting held on March 31, it was decided to issue guidelines which will enable students to pursue two academic programmes simultaneously because the NEP 2020 emphasises the need to facilitate multiple pathways to learning involving both formal and non-formal education forms, in the sense that a combination of the physical model, as well as the online form, should be used to provide more freedom to the students to acquire multiple skills,” UGC chairman, Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar said.

“A student will be able to pursue a B.Com. and a mathematics degree together if the student wishes to, and if he or she is eligible to do so. The idea is to provide as much flexibility to students as possible,” the former JNU vice-chancellor, who recently became UGC chairman, added.