Thread by @suryadeeptonag

Fee hikes in college and accessible education - a thread

So I recently wrote an op-ed published in @KalpaIISERPune (link at the bottom of the thread) about some possible unfortunate consequences of Fee hikes at IISER Pune. Here's a thread with some of the key points.

IISER Pune and other IISERs have had one of the most affordable undergraduate programmes when compared to IITs and IIMs. This has played a crucial role in making IISER a diverse place where students from different backgrounds can study regardless of their financial abilities

The MHRD has had a policy of increasing tuition fees for students over the years. Since tuition fees is exempted for PhD students and students from SC/ST backgrounds, the issue had mostly affected students from the General category, OBC-NCL and the EWS section, until recently.

The idea is to make IISERs less reliant on government funds and make them self sufficient. However in order to actually do so the institutes will have to increase the fees considerably because of their state-of-the-art facilities and supreme quality of education.

Today the fees has culminated to around 35-50k for Gen/EWS/OBC-NCL students of which the tuition fees is 27.5-33.4k. A consequence is that the MHRD charges the full fees for EWS/OBC-NCL students despite the govt. formally acknowledging that the students are from "EWS" and "NCL".

More recently, since 2019, the MHRD has not hiked the tuition fees. However, the fees for campus amenities like water, electricity, sports, etc. which was constant all this time has begun to be hiked. This means now even students from SC/ST backgrounds are facing a fee hike.

This hike feels even more pronounced because of IISER Pune's empathetic policy of relaxing fees for campus amenities when the college was closed due to COVID. For instance SC/ST students who had to pay ~1,000 in 2021 are now being asked to pay ~9,000.

The problem of high fees is particularly bigger in science and research colleges like IISER when compared to engineering, medical or law colleges because research pays lesser so paying back loans aren't as easy. Students also often have to go through PhDs before they have jobs.

IISERs also have an added disadvantage in that they are relatively new and do not have enough alumni who have made it so big financially that they can donate and run the institute. Furthermore the alumni are probably scientists with moderate incomes. Thus we rely on the govt.

Despite the fees increasing, students at IISER enjoy enormous subsidies. Therefore a high fees introduces a barrier in who can avail said subsidies i.e. you need to be a certain amount of rich before you get access to this subsidised world-class education.

High fees is also more likely to mean that children are going to be dependent on their parents' financial support for higher education. Parents are more likely to enforce their bias against the "low-paying" pure sciences and force the students to study elsewhere.

The problem will be even more severe for girls whose numbers are significantly lower than the national college enrollment sex ratio as it is well documented that parents are less likely to pay for their daughters' education than their sons'.

IISERP has one of the most inclusive and diverse student communities that I've seen in India and along with the admin's commitment (who help some students out with financial assistance) a very important role has been played by the low fees which institutionalises that commitment.

Here's a link to the full article
kalpa.iiserpune.ac.in/should-we-real…

So apparently PhD and int-PhD students are not exempted from tuition fees, my bad.

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