Institutes like Indian Institutes of Management and IITs will be charging substantially more from students from the following session. Education today as an idea cannot be separated from the careers the market driven economy is increasingly throwing open and especially the bright careers that have been waiting for the students at the end of the session. Education serves society in different ways. These bright young people will serve the country by bringing value to the companies they join. There may be a case for lower fee for scholars who contribute to society’s knowledge out of the pure love of knowledge; there is no case, however, for people seeking careers to be subsidized by huge outlays by the state.

We all know how assiduously students await the yearly rankings that appear in certain national magazine. Is there not a desire among students to get into well-known liberal arts and social science (LA&SS) departments? The best LA&SS institutions are listed under the state sector. Colleges may be managed by private trusts, but staff salary, course curricula and fee structure are managed by the state through the University Grants Commission.

 Higher education is valuable product, if one may use the word, in today’s market economy. The real premium in the available bouquet of resources is knowledge, and which institution within India is better positioned to deliver this resource than the university system. The mushrooming of teaching shops that charge extortionate fees for less than useful dissemination of skills and knowledge ought to alert both teachers and the UGC to the huge potential that is waiting to be tapped. The thrust here is not to suggest blanket corn-modification of college education. Nevertheless, creative efforts towards rationalization of existing curricula and corporatization of specific departments within the university system can help tap the huge demand that exists in the country (and overseas) for quality education.

Any college or department in any university in the country ought to be allowed to fix fees for students. The fee charged will obviously have to be commensurate with the quality of education an institution can, or is seen to, offer. That in itself will be incentive enough for individual institutions to belt and become competitive. All the obtuse talk about accreditisation and autonomy will become unnecessary under such an open system. The academic credentials of faculty members will naturally become important. The performance of each department in an institution will be scrutinized every year, and peer pressure will force departments within standards and work towards achieving targeted goals. And teachers of rare merit will not have to await pay commission awards; they will be paid remunerations commensurate with the value of their scholarship and teaching skills

The real issue is not the rise of fees but accessibility of engineering and management education in general and management education in particular. Nobody is saying that the management education should not be available to the economically weaker section of society. It is the road to get there that merits discussion. It needs to be highlighted that while rise in fees in IIM system merits so much debate, no thought is given to the fee structure of Indian School of Business (ISB) and similar other institutions. Management education is nowhere in the world is cheap as in India. The rise in the fees is inevitable because of market forces, need for autono¬my and global patterns. Other reasons like retention of faculty, pay commission recommendations, etc.