Friday, January 4, 2008

Universal Syllabus in Universities! - TOI - 04/01/2008

Single syllabus for varsities mooted

Seethalakshmi S | TNN


Bangalore: Soon, all universities in India could have a uniform curriculum. In other words, students of Mumbai and Bangalore universities, or any other university, will study the same syllabi.
In a complete revamp of the functioning of universities across the country, the University Grants Commission (UGC) has made this sweeping reform proposal to ensure the horizontal mobility of students among uni
versities. The move will definitely help students whose parents have transferable jobs.
“At present, the quality of syllabi varies from one university to another, making it difficult for students to move. A uniform curriculum will ensure that quality is maintained across the country. An action plan to operationalize the new strategies has been prepared. This will also involve upgrading of syllabi at the under-graduation and post-graduation levels,’’ a source told TOI.

A NEW CHAPTER
Creating new univs out of big varsities
Internationalisation of education, including twinning of programmes, joint degrees and collaboration with foreign universities
Enhancing enrolment by 5% during the 11th plan by establishing more varsities and colleges besides increasing intake in existing colleges
UGC plans to split big univs for efficiency
Bangalore/Mumbai: The UGC has proposed to improve the quality of state universities and colleges and bridge the quality gap between universities. A strategy will be prepared to bring B and C grade universities on par with A grade ones.
Another major reform move by the UGC is the creation of new universities from among the existing big ones. The UGC has also decided to put a cap on the maximum number of colleges that can be affiliated to a university.
Not just that, an alternative to the existing model, including a constituent colleges system, unitary universities with undergraduation and postgraduation, PhD and integrated facilities, will be brought in to reduce the load on the big universities. The academic and administrative reforms committee will look into the methodology for admissions, credit\grading system, semester system, teacher assessment, examination\evaluation reforms and the composition
of university academic bodies like the senate, syndicate and executive council. Also, the UGC will launch a special drive to establish 370 educationally backward districts. Under the 11th plan, the UGC is looking at public-private partnerships where the private sector will finance higher education.
The idea of a common curriculum for varsities across the country dates back to the NDA regime. But several varsities rejected the idea fearing it would be biased towards Hindutva. But an expert from the Mumbai University who has been monitoring curriculum changes pointed out that a common curriculum was not enforceable. “We speak of university autonomy and weaving in of local issues in the curricula. But common curriculum is more likely to be a model curriculum,’’ he said.
UGC chairman Sukhdeo Thorat pointed out that the committee set up was merely going to review the curricula in various varsities and suggest changes. “How can a common curriculum be applicable to the country? It has been tried in 2002 and not worked. We won’t enforce a common curriculum, merely review it across varsities,’’ he said.

Students stand to benefit as the UGC proposes to bridge the quality gap between universities. It has also decided to put a cap on the maximum number of colleges that can be affiliated to a university

Thursday, January 3, 2008

New Sheriff, New Hopes!

Let's hope this helps the cause of education. :)

TOI - 03/01/2008

Educationist will be new city sheriff

S Balakrishnan | TNN


Mumbai: After being without a sheriff for two years, Mumbai has a new incumbent in the p o s t — I n d u S h a h a n i , principal of HR College of Commerce.
After the last sheriff ’s tenure ended, the government was unable to find a suitable candidate, drawing criticism from several quarters.
The sheriff ’s post, though titular, saw hectic lobbying for it. The prime contenders were banker K D Vora, chairman of Kapole Cooperative
Bank, and R N Singh, owner of a security firm who enjoys the backing of former minister Kripa Shankar Singh. The CM eventually handpicked Shahani for the post in view of her contribution to the cause of education.
Shahani has been in the field of education for 33 years. Principal of HR College for the last seven years, she was vice-principal before that. She is a vice-president of the International Baccalaureate Organisation and a member of Mumbai University’s academic council.
Shahani told TOI, “I will be able to speak on my plans for Mumbai only after I am sworn in.’’

Indu Shahani

Now that's, Interesting!!! - TOI - 03/01/2008

Indian edu is new fad in Japan



Japan, renowned for its technology, is suffering a sudden crisis of confidence these days about its ability to compete with its emerging Asian rivals, China and India. But even in this fad-obsessed nation, one result was never expected—a growing craze for Indian education.
The rising insecurity about the nation’s schools, which nottoo-long-ago churned out international toppers, is increasingly driving many in Japan to look for lessons from India, the country they see as the world’s ascendant education superpower.

Bookstores are filled with titles like Extreme Indian Arithmetic Drills and The Unknown Secrets of the Indians. Newspapers carry reports of Indian children memorizing multiplication tables far beyond nine times nine, the standard for young elementary stu
dents in Japan. And Japan’s few Indian international schools are reporting a surge in applications from Japanese families.
At the Little Angels English Academy & International Kindergarten, the textbooks are from India, most of the teachers are South Asian and classroom
posters depict animals out of Indian tales. The kindergarten students even colour maps of India in the green and saffron of its flag. This, when Little Angels is located in a Tokyo suburb where only one of its 45 students is Indian. Viewing another Asian country as a model in education, or almost anything else, would have been unheard of just a few years ago, say education experts and historians. Much of Japan has long looked down on the rest of Asia, priding itself on being the region’s most advanced nation. Indeed, Japan has dominated the continent for more than a century, first as an imperial power and more recently as the first Asian economy to achieve Western levels of economic development. NYT NEWS SERVICE Education: India’s doing what Japan once did
The Japanese are increasingly turning to the Indian eduction system for their children. In the last few years, Japan has been increasingly gripped by the fear of being overshadowed by India and China, which are rapidly gaining in economic weight and sophistication. The government here has tried to preserve Japan’s technological lead and strengthen its military. But grudgingly, Japan is starting to respect its neighbours.
Last month, a national cry of alarm greeted the announcement by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development that in a survey of math skills, Japan had fallen from first place in 2000 to 10th place and from second to sixth spot in science.
While China has stirred more concern here as a political and economic challenger, India has emerged as the country to beat in a more benign rivalry over education. In part, this reflect’s China’s image in Japan as a cheap manufacturer and technological imitator. But India’s success in software development, internet businesses and knowledgeintensive industries in all of which Japan has failed to make inroads has set off more than a tinge of envy.

Most annoying for many Japanese is that the aspects of Indian education they now praise are similar to those that once made Japan famous for its work ethic and discipline—learning more at an earlier age, an emphasis on memorisation and cramming and a focus on the basics, especially in math and science.
India’s more demanding education standards are appar
ent at the Little Angels Kindergarten and are its main selling point. Its two-year-old pupils are taught to count to 20, three-year-olds are introduced to computers, and fiveyear-olds learn to multiply, solve math word problems and write one-page essays in English, tasks most Japanese schools do not teach until at least second grade.
Japan’s interest in learning from Indian education is a lot like America’s interest in learning from Japanese education. As with many new things here, the interest in Indian-style education has quickly become a fad.
Indian education is a frequent topic in forums like talk shows. Popular books claim to reveal the Indian secrets for multiplying and dividing multiple-digit numbers. Even Japan’s conservative education ministry has begun discussing Indian methods. Eager parents try to send their children to Japan’s roughly half-a-dozen Indian schools, hoping for an edge on the competitive college entrance exams. In Tokyo, the two largest Indian schools, which teach kindergarten through junior high mainly to Indian expatriates, have received a sudden increase in inquiries from Japanese parents starting last year. NYT NEWS SERVICE

TAKING A LEAF OUT OF INDIA’S TEXTBOOK: Japanese children in an Indian kindergarten school


Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Good news for Engineering Students - TOI article - 2/1/08

IIT to air lectures live from today

TIMES NEWS NETWORK


Mumbai: For lakhs of aspirants who don’t make it to the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs), the new year has brought in cheer—this tech school is opening its classrooms beginning Wednesday for engineering colleges across the country.
As reported by TOI on December 8, IIT-Bombay will broadcast its lectures live through Edusat, the satellite which caters exclusively to the educational sector. Students of any engineering institute will now not only have real-time access to IITB tutoring, but can also interact with resident faculty at Powai.
Inaugurating the live interactive classroom, former TCS vice chairman F C
Kohli said he had visited the MIT’s classrooms of the future and India needs to harness technology in education to a great extent. “I will not call this distance learning, but a classroom redesigned. This is virtual live education,’’ said Kohli, speaking on the IITB-ISRO initiative.
Hinting at the poor qual
ity of education imparted in tier two engineering colleges, he said institutions need to realise they are not graduating “progressive technicians, but progressive thinkers and knowledge workers.’’ Kohli, who is also the chairman of the board of governors at the College of Engineering, Pune, which had invested in setting up a dedicated fibre optic line to transmit lectures from IITB, said engineering colleges will have to work on “prerequisites’’ before exposing their students to IIT-B lectures. “Basic pre-requisites, attendance when the course is on and follow-up are three essentials that colleges will have to keep in mind if they want to start offering the IIT courses,’’ the father of Indian IT said. Additional chief secretary (higher and technical education) Joyce Shankaran suggested that IITs look beyond engineering colleges and transmit lectures to polytechnics and science colleges too.
For IIT-B, director Ashok Misra pointed out that the initiative will go a long way in furthering the cause of education. IIT will start
transmitting lectures from 8.30 am to 8 pm. Head of IIT’s centre for distance engineering education programme Kannan Moudgalya said almost 100 engineering colleges had already purchased ISRO receivers to access the live IIT-B lectures. To begin with, IIT-B will broadcast lectures in 13 courses, including software engineering, information systems, computation fluid dynamics, embedded systems, instrumentation and process control and fibre optics communication. “Besides, this initiative should be seen as an inclusive effort of all the IITs. Subject experts from other IITs and engineering colleges can also come to IIT-B and deliver lectures,’’ added Moudgalya.
toireporter@timesgroup.com

Monday, December 31, 2007

The Future of Webucation! - Economic Times - 30/12/2007

All the world’s a college

Net Effect: Free Lecture Downloads By Elite Colleges Provide Access To World-Class Education

Justin Pope BOSTON



GILBERT Strang is a quiet man with a rare talent: helping others understand linear algebra. He has written a half-dozen popular college textbooks, and for years a few hundred students at the elite Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been privileged to take his course. Recently, with the growth of computer science, demand to understand linear algebra has surged. But so has the number of students Strang can teach. An MIT initiative called ‘OpenCourseWare’ makes virtually all the school’s courses available online for free — lecture notes, readings, tests and often video lectures. Strang’s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 million times since June alone.

In his Istanbul dormitory, Kemal Burcak Kaplan, an undergraduate at Bogazici University, downloads Strang’s lectures to try to boost his grade in a class there. Outside Calcutta, graduate student Sriram Chandrasekaran uses them to brush up on matrices for his engineering courses at the Indian Institute of Technology. Many ‘students’ are college teachers themselves, like Sheraz ali Khan at a small engineering institute in Peshawar, Pakistan, and Noorali Jiwaji, at the Open University of Tanzania. They use Strang and other MIT professors as guides to design their own classes, and direct students to MIT’s courses for help. Others are closer to MIT’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, campus. Some are MIT students and alumni, while others have no connection at all — like Gus Whelan, a retiree on nearby Cape Cod, and Dustin Darcy, a 27-year-old video game programmer in Los Angeles who uses linear algebra regularly in his work.
“Rather than going through my old, dusty books,” Darcy said, “I thought I might as well go through it from the top and see if I learn something new.”There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious. The world’s top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they are arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

MIT’s initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow. As with many technology trends, new services and platforms are driving change. Last spring marked the debut of ‘iTunes U’, a section of Apple’s popular music and video downloading service now publicly hosting free material from 28 colleges. Meanwhile, the University of California, Berkeley recently announced it would be the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. Berkeley was already posting lectures, but YouTube has dramatically expanded their reach.

If there is not yet something for everyone, it is only a matter of time. On iTunes,
popular recent downloads include a climate change panel at Stanford, lectures on existentialism by Cal-Berkeley professor Hubert Dreyfus, and a performance of Mozart’s requiem by the Duke Chapel Choir. Berkeley’s offerings include 48 classes, from ‘Engineering Thermodynamics’ to ‘Human Emotion’. “It’s almost as good as being there,” said Whelan, the Massachusetts retiree, of the MIT classes he has sampled. “The only thing that’s lacking is the pressure.” He says he usually doesn’t do the homework assignments, but adds: “Now that I’m not in school I don’t have to do that anymore.”

YouTube, iTunes, OpenCourseWare — none are the full college experience. You cannot raise your hand and ask a question. You cannot get a letter of recommendation. And most importantly, almost everywhere, you cannot get credit or earn a degree. That caveat, however, is what has made all this possible. When the internet emerged, experts predicted it would revolutionise higher education, cutting its tether to a college campus. Technology could help solve one of the fundamental challenges of the 21st century: providing a mass population with higher education at a time when a college degree was increasingly essential for economic success.
Today, the internet has indeed transformed higher education. A multibilliondollar industry, both for-profit and nonprofit, has sprung up offering online training and degrees. Figures from the Sloan


Consortium, an online learning group, report about 3.5 million students are signed up for at least one online course — or about 20% of all students at degree-granting institutions.
But it has not been as clear what role — if any — elite universities would play in what experts call the ‘massification’ of higher education. Their finances are based on prestige, which means turning students away, not enrolling more. How could they teach the masses without diminishing the value of their degree?

But MIT’s 2001 debut of OpenCourse-Ware epitomised a key insight: Elite universities can separate their credential from their teaching — and give at least parts of their teaching away as a public service. They are not diminishing their reputations at all. In fact, they are expanding their reach and reputation. It turns out there is extraordinary demand for bits and pieces of the education places like MIT provide, even without the diploma.

OpenCourseWare’s site gets more than 1 million hits per month, with translated versions getting 500,000 more. About 60% of users are outside the United States. About 15% are educators, and 30% students at other universities. About half have no university affiliation.

“I think the fundamental realisation is that distance learning will solve the problem of access to certification, but there’s a larger problem, which is access to information,” says Steve Carson, director of external relations for the MIT initiative.

“If you’re going to work as a public health professional, you need the certification,” Carson says. “If you’re working in a community” — say, in Africa _ “you don’t need the certification. You just need access to the information.”

About 11,600 kilometers from Cambridge, the Polytechnic of Namibia is the kind of place eager to learn from MIT. Though barely a decade old, the school in the young African nation’s capital Windhoek, is poised to play a key role in the country’s development. It is one of 84 sites in Africa where MIT has shipped its course materials on hard drives for institutions to store locally on their own networks. With bandwidth costing about 1,000 times its price in the United States, patching into OpenCourseWare over the internet would crash the school’s fragile networks.
CIO Laurent Evrard says the Polytechnic takes pride in standards on a par with
top global peers — he notes how US exchange students get credit for work there — and says students like using Open-CourseWare to see how they stack up.

“Everybody here knows about MIT,” he says, though it does not hurt that the school rector — its top official — is an alumnus. On the opposite coast of southern Africa, Jiwaji says most of his Tanzanian students have never heard of MIT. Students use the courses “because it gives them a tool. They feel lost and they don’t have good books,” Jiwaji says. “They need a guide to help them.” His distance university — with 30,000 registered students — has OpenCourseWare available at centres around the capital of Dar es Salaam. There, it gets an impressive 600 hits per day, mostly in management classes.

Though it has found a wider audience, OpenCourseWare was originally intended for teachers. The idea was not just to show off MIT’s geniuses but to share its innovative teaching methods. After examining an MIT course called ‘Machine Structures’, Khan, the Pakistani professor, redesigned his lab assignments for a computer science class to get students more involved, asking them to design and build their own microprocessors.

“It really encourages the students to discover and try something new,” he said. “Normally the stress here is on how things work, not on creating things of your own.” MIT’s free offerings focus mostly on well-organised texts like syllabuses and readings, along with an expanding video lecture collection. Others, like Stanford and Bowdoin College in Maine, provide more polish, editing and features. Berkeley, meanwhile, is focused less on bells and whistles than on ramping up its ability to roll out content with a system that automatically records and posts lectures. Berkeley’s eight YouTube courses drew 1.5 million downloads in the first month, said Ben Hubbard, co-manager of the webcast.berkeley program, and the school is inundated with requests to post more.

“That’s why we’re so focused on automation,” he said. “Our motto is ‘Fiat Lux’ _ ‘let there be light.’ We feel like this is a great way to let the light of Berkeley shine out on the world.”
A big obstacle is cost. Professors are reluctant to participate unless staff are provided to help with logistics. A major expense is video camera operators, unless schools can persuade lecturers to stand still at the lectern. MIT estimates OpenCourseWear costs a hefty $20,000 per course. Money from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation started the project, but from now on it will rely mostly on contributions from MIT’s budget and endowment, and from visitor donations. –– AP


GLOBAL WINDOW
MIT prof Gilbert Strang‘s Math 18.06 course is among the most popular, with visitors downloading his lectures more than 1.3 m times since June alone


Sheraz Ali Khan in Peshawar uses Strang and other MIT profs as guides to design his own classes and direct students to MIT’s courses for help


Video game programmer Dustin Darcy in Los Angeles uses linear algebra regularly in his work and prefers this to going through his ‘dusty,old books’

Sunday, December 30, 2007

The new face of Education - Going High Tech and Global

The faster we get there the better! I wish we had free yet Quality Online Education available for the masses a decade ago :)

The TOI article - 30/12/2007

[I just love TOI for being so active in reporting the education scenario in India - it helps!]

2008 TIME TO CHANGE

THE WORLD IS YOUR CLASSROOM

Virtual Campuses Are Gaining Ground, Foreign Players Are Bringing In Funds and Investing Resources, Even IIT Is Broadcasting Live From Powai

Hemali Chhapia | TNN


Mumbai: Higher education for Priyanka Sinha, a class ten student who will enter college next year, is surely not going to be the same as it was for her brother who joined the campus world three years ago. For one, expansion in higher education will give her a wider range of options to choose from in terms of colleges and universities — she could even sit at home and enrol for a recognised course abroad, online. But her family will also have to shell out a substantially larger sum than what they did for their son. And given the rise in quotas, the competition will get stiff.

FEE HIKE
It was a government paper titled ‘Government Subsidies in India’ in 1997 that classified higher education as a “Non-merit Good’’ as compared to elementary education which was defined as a “Merit good’’, which required states to subsidise it heavily.

The same government later slotted higher education into a category called “Merit 2 Goods’’ that need not be subsidised by the state at the same level as “Merit Goods’’. Ever since, the government has hinted at increasing the cost for higher education.

Earlier this year, while increasing the financial allocation for education, the Planning Commission had suggested the need to hike fees in colleges and central and state universities. But alongside, the government also promised easy access to loans and a larger outlay for scholarships.

Vice chancellor of the University of Mumbai Vijay Khole pointed out that in Mumbai, “An interim report prepared by Principal Naresh Chandra is being relooked (at) and fee hike is imperative to better the amenities on college campuses.’’ The interim report submitted last year had recommended a 10%-15% hike, but members of the management council had suggested that the committee could relook at the figures and probably bring in a larger hike.

QUOTAS
Apart from fees, reservations is the other issue which will overshadow the higher education sector. The coming year may change the face of some of the country’s centres of excellence. The UPA government unleashed the quota genie in 2006 on all Centrally-aided institutions across the country, including Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs); campuses thereafter erupted in protests and counter-protests. While the IITs and IIMs have gone into expansion mode to accommodate more candidates from the Other Backward Classes, the case is pending in the Supreme Court.


Director of IIT-Bombay Ashok Misra pointed out that the coming year will also see “enhanced stress’’ on research as well as technology incubation. “We may also be able to set up a Tech Park, which will be able to support companies that are incubated on campus,’’ he said.

ONLINE EDUCATION
Peter Drucker in his article, The Death of the University, had said: “Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics. Universities won’t survive....’’ 2008 may well mark the beginning of this trend.

Virtual campuses are going to be the reality of this year. Bhaskar Ranjan Das, the (west India) director of U-21 Global — a Singapore-based firm that offers online courses in management and hospitality — pointed out, “online would be the way to go if access to higher education is to go up.’’ His institute runs online courses in collaboration with several international universities, and enrolment in India has been increasing “exponentially’’ — by over 100% annually. Presently, there are 1,200 Indian students enrolled with U-21 Global.

Expansion in this sector has also propelled the union government to pass a bill governing digital education. “The Union HRD ministry has prepared a draft law to provide legal backing for the Distance Education Council (DEC), currently a body under Indira Gandhi National Open University,’’ said a senior member of the HRD ministry. His ministry had sought the Cabinet’s approval to set up a statutory body that will also monitor courses being provided by foreign universities/colleges through the internet.

Even established institutions are taking their courseware to the world via broadband or television. Starting January 2008, IIT-Bombay will broadcast lectures live through Edusat, a satellite which caters exclusively to the education sector. Students of any engineering institute will now not only have real-time access to IIT-B tutoring, but can interact with faculty at Powai. “There is an urgent need to get more and more high quality educationists. Through distance education, we will be able to provide high quality content to other technology schools across the country,’’ added Misra.

In fact, presently, 23 percent of all higher education enrolments in India are in distance education. According to a McKinsey-Nasscom Report, the Indian government has targeted 40 percent of all higher education participation via distance education by 2010.

FOREIGN/PRIVATE PLAYERS
Get a degree from a fullfledged foreign university sitting at home in India, from 2008 onwards. India lifted the restrictions on foreign direct investment
in education way back in 2001. But the union government has not yet brought out a clear policy for foreign players. It may do that in the coming year.

Besides, Maharashtra may get its share of private universities. Like Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Devesh Kapur, Associate professor of government at Harvard University point out in their paper, ‘Indian Higher Education Reform: From Half-baked Socialism to Half-Baked Capitalism’: “Privatisation has resulted from the breakdown of state system and the exit of Indian elites from public institutions.’’

And so when the state will have players like the Tatas and Ambanis setting up universities, Priyanka will be able to do something her brother could not — choose.

THE 2007 REPORT CARD

J M. Lyngdoh Commission gave its nod to hold students’ union elections in universities and colleges. The panel, however, limited election expenditure to Rs 5,000 and banned political interference in college polls.

The apex court comes down on ragging. Based on the recommendations of a Committee on Ragging led by the former CBI director R K Raghavan, the SC said ragging should be made a criminal offence. The committee had said those caught ragging should be booked by the police, expelled from college and denied future admission.

The Joint Entrance Exam conducted by the IITs this year revealed that almost 14% of successful candidates from the general category are OBCs. Across IITs, a total of 990 OBC students qualified from the open category this year.

Following up on the recommendations of the National Knowledge Commission, the University of Mumbai permitted colleges to offer their popular courses in two shifts —- morning and evening.

IIT-B took over one of the country’s oldest academic establishments - the Institute of Science. The erstwhile Royal Institute of Science was among the first home-grown institutions dedicated to pure science and related research. Renowned scientists like Homi Bhabha, M G K Menon, V V Narlikar and chemical technologist R D Desai are among its alumni.

The Prime Minister announced the setting up of 1,600 new Industrial Training Institutes (ITIs) and Polytechnics, 5,000 new Skill Development Centres, 30 new central universities, 5 new Institutes of Science Education and Research, 8 new IITs, 7 new IIMs and 20 new Indian Institutes of Information Technology.


Health minister Anbumani Ramadoss proposed that medical graduates be awarded their MBBS certificates only after a compulsory yearlong rural internship. After countrywide protests, the health minister backed down and declared that the internship would be part of the existing five-and-ahalf year MBBS program.me.


University of Mumbai came up with a hair-brained idea - it set aside finances to conduct a feasibility study on listing the state university on the stock exchange. After being pulled up by the central government, the study was conveniently given a burial.



IIT alumni backed by former McKinsey MD Rajat Gupta, also the founding member and chairman of the board of directors of the PAN-IIT group of former students, drew up a blueprint to build resources for a new IIT..


This is exactly why I won't study at IIMs

Education looses its purpose when it get treated like a business. Why can't the so called best institutes provide quality education at nominal fees. Why should the best be offered on Financial Merit!

This is getting low, dirty and disgusting!

The Economic Times article - 29/12/2007

COSTLY LESSONS

IIMs to hike fees by up to 50% from next year

STEEPEST HIKE FROM IIM-A

Mansi Bhatt AHMEDABAD



GET READY to pay a huge premium to study at the country’s premier management institutes. Despite strong opposition from the human resource development ministry, the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) are set for a huge fee hike from the next academic session.

The proposed fee structure will see IIMAhmedabad effecting one of the steepest hikes in the history of management education in India. The IIM-A intends to hike its fees to whopping Rs 3 lakh for the 2008-2010 batch from the current Rs 2 lakh. This 50% increase will be the steepest fee hike by any IIM. Last year, IIM-Bangalore increased annual fee by Rs 75,000, from Rs 1.75 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh. IIM-B plans to further increase it to Rs 2.75 lakh for the next academic session.

The board of governors of IIM-A has approved the steep hike despite strong reservations from the HRD ministry. According to sources, at a recent board meeting of IIMs, the members approved fee hike for the flagship PG programme for the next academic session. The ministry officials do not seem to be happy with the decision and are expected to ask for less stiff hike. IIM-A last increased its fees in March 2007, from Rs 1.77 lakh to Rs 2 lakh.

The institutes are increasing fees to offset the rising expenditure per student. “Majority of the board members accepted the proposal despite opposition from the members from state and central governments who thought the hike was too steep,” said a member who attended the meeting. While the HRD ministry representatives and the state government officials opposed the hike, the other members argued that hike was imperative considering the Pay Commission recommendations.

I I M - A
To hike fees for 2008-2010 batch from Rs 2 lakh/year to Rs 3 lakh/year It had increased its fees from Rs 1.77 lakh to Rs 2 lakh in March 2007

I I M - B
To increase fees to Rs 2.75 lakh for the next academic session In March this year, it had hiked fees from Rs 1.75 lakh to Rs 2.5 lakh

I I M - C & I I M - L
Raised fees to around Rs 2 lakh in the past one-and-a-half years