The College has an illustrious history and pedigree which it shares with the two other sister institutions: Vidsagar College and Vidyasagar College for Women. In 1859, when Pandit Iswarchandra Vidyasagar became the President of the
Managing Committee of the Calcutta Training School, it paved the way for the Metropolitan Institution established in 1860. The growth of the Institution led to its affiliation to Calcutta University for Arts only on January 1st, 1872. In 1917 it was renamed Vidyasagar College. Since then the College has witnessed a rapid growth; subsequently its academic curriculum expanded with the formal beginning of the Commerce Department in 1922 and the Morning Section for Women in 1931. The Commerce Department of the College has the distinction of being the oldest commerce teaching Department in India. In 1928 it acquired the affiliation to the B. Com. Course (under the University of Calcutta). In 1951 a separate wing of the College, devoted to Commerce teaching in the evening shift, was established owing to the rapid growth of the Department in terms of faculty and student strength. The evening section emerged as an independent entity with a separate Governing Body in 1961 bearing the name Vidyasagar Evening College and since then the College is being run with the mission of disseminating knowledge to a cross section of students, especially to those who are constrained to work during the day to support themselves and their families. In the course of its expansion the institution had as its alumni Swami Vivekananda, Acharya Prafulla Chandra Ray, Acharya Jadunath Sarkar, Ram Monohar Lohia, Babu Jagjiban Ram and many others who made immence contribution in various walks of life. The institution also had the services of such great luminaries as Rashtraguru Surendranath Banerjee, Desbandhu Cittaranjan Das, Professor Sisir Kumar Bhaduri, Nabin Chandra Vidyaratna and even Rabindranath Tagore in various capacities. The commerce Department of the college, established in 1922, has the distinction of being the oldest commerce teaching department in India.
In pursuit of this mission the College has gone through an uninterrupted surge of expansion. True to the philanthropic spirit of Vidyasagar, the founder of the College, the teaching and the non-teaching staff are tireless in exploring new avenues of growth and making the functioning of the College more responsive to the needs of the student. But limitation of space, since the main campus is utilized by the three Colleges on a time sharing basis, has so far kept the expansion of its academic activity rather modest. However with the recent construction of separate buildings for Vidyasagar Evening College and Vidyasagar College for Women (by the acquisition of a plot of land adjacent to the main building of the College), the Institution is favourably poised for the fulfillment of quite a few of its plans. Owing to the alteration of the College working hours, the College authority has proposed to change the name of the College from Vidyasagar Evening College to Vidyasagar Metropolitan College.
The proposal has been approved in the Syndicate of the University of Calcutta and approval has been sought from the UGC in this regard. Presently besides offering Honours and General courses in Commerce, the College offers Undergraduate courses in Humanities and Science subjects, with Honours in Bengali, English, Political Science, Geography, Mathematics, Physics and Physiology. The College has also become a study center of Post Graduate courses in Geography as well as Dietetics and Community Nutrition Management (DCNM) under the Directorate of Distance Education, Vidyasagar University, from the 2014-15 academic sessions.