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Colleges that accept KCET

Last checked against the official KEA site: August 2026

KCET is accepted by government, university, aided, and private engineering, architecture, pharmacy, agriculture and veterinary colleges across Karnataka. Over 200 engineering colleges alone take part in KCET counselling, most affiliated with Visvesvaraya Technological University (VTU), each identified in counselling by an official KEA college code.

Broad categories of participating colleges

• Government engineering colleges: state-run institutions, generally with lower fees and high demand. University Visvesvaraya College of Engineering (UVCE) in Bengaluru, established in 1917 and affiliated with Bangalore University rather than VTU, is Karnataka's oldest engineering college and the best-known example.
• University constituent colleges: run directly by a state university.
• Private aided colleges: privately run but with a share of government-subsidised seats.
• Private unaided colleges: the majority of KCET seats by volume, affiliated mainly with VTU. This is where most well-known private colleges sit, including RV College of Engineering (RVCE), BMS College of Engineering (BMSCE), M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology (MSRIT), and Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering (DSCE).
• Autonomous institutions: private colleges that set their own curriculum and grading independently of VTU, generally among the more selective options. PES University and RV College of Engineering both hold autonomous status while still drawing from the KCET counselling pool.

How to research a specific college

Before ranking a college highly in your counselling choices, it's worth checking directly with the institution or its official listing for current affiliation and accreditation (AICTE/NBA/NAAC as applicable), placement record, faculty strength, and hostel or campus facilities. None of that shows up in the KCET cutoff number alone. See the searchable colleges directory for sourced profiles of well-known colleges, and use the comparison tool to weigh a shortlist side by side.

How many seats are there, and where do you check availability?

"Seats" on this site means the seat matrix: KEA's official count of how many admission spots each college has, broken down by branch and reservation category. KCET 2026 offered more than 86,000 seats across all streams (engineering, pharmacy, agriculture and the rest combined), with roughly 66,000 of those in engineering alone, spread across 200+ colleges. That total shifts a little every counselling round, as colleges confirm final numbers and any seats are added or withdrawn.

KEA publishes the authoritative, college-by-college, branch-by-branch, category-by-category seat matrix as a PDF on the official portal ahead of each counselling round (look for a link named something like "Engineering Seat Matrix" on cetonline.karnataka.gov.in/kea). That PDF, not any third-party summary, is the number that actually determines what you can be allotted in a given round.