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IIM announces a steep fee hike

CALCUTTA : After Bangalore and Ahemdabad, the Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Calcutta has also increased fee for its two-year postgraduate diploma in management programme from Rs 9 lakh to Rs 13.5 lakh citing “excellent placements.”.

Ajit Balakrishnan, the chairman of the board of governors justified the fee hike on April 3 saying “The decision to raise the fees was taken after considering the fact that we have had excellent placements this year. And we need more funds…. So, the hike is justified.”

The new fee will come into effect for students taking admission from this academic session, due to start in another two months. The decision was taken at a board meeting before the institute’s annual convocation.

The institute, which had refrained from big hikes claiming that fees were not “make or break” for an institute, conceded that it needed more money. “Earlier, we used to believe that fees are not the benchmark for academic quality but things have changed. We need more money for infrastructure development and research. Moreover, we can give more scholarships with this money,” Balakrishnan said.

For the past three years, the top three business schools in the country had not received any grant from the Centre except for the allowance for infrastructure augmentation to implement the OBC reservation.

“We are adding over 5 lakh sqft to accommodate more students and create more facilities. We also want to focus more on research. The increased fees will help us turn IIM Calcutta into a world-class institute,” a faculty member said.

The fees at the three IIMs are still around one-fourth of those charged by top B-schools in the US and Europe, the faculty member said.

The fee hike will enable IIM Calcutta to generate surplus funds for long-term development. The institute is estimated to spend around Rs 10 lakh on each student.

Although IIM Calcutta had planned to admit around 464 students this year to implement the OBC quota, lack of infrastructure has forced the authorities to restrict the number to 375.

Ahemdabad, Bangalore IIMs trigger fee hike

From Sanjiv Dube
NEW DELHI : On March 29 the Board of Governors of the IIM Bangalore which met in Bangalore on March 29 under the chairmanship of Reliance Industries chairman Mukesh Ambani decided to revise the fees from Rs 11.5 lakh to Rs 13 lakh from the academic year 2010.

Apart from fee hike, Bangalore IIM has also raised the intake for 2010 batch from the existing 350 to 375. For 2011-12 batch, it will be further increased to 425 seats with an additional section. With the increase in the intake, the institute will have complied with the 27 per cent OBC quota, IIM-B director Pankaj Chandra told reporters.

The decision had a quick reaction and IIM Ahemdabad also announced a fee hike on March 30. It raised the admission fee for its postgraduate programme (PGP) batch of 2010-2012 to Rs 13.7 lakh, a 9.6 per cent hike from the Rs 12.5 lakh the 2009-11 batch paid. The fee includes all costs other than food.

IIM-A has made an upward revision of its fees for the third consecutive year. Now the students joining the June 2010-12 batch for the two-year PGP course, the fees structure will be Rs. 13.70 lakh — Rs 6.6 lakh in the first year and the balance Rs. 7.10 lakh in the second year — as against Rs. 12.5 lakh last year, which was raised from Rs. 11.5 lakh the previous year.

The fees hike proposal was discussed at the IIM-A Board of Governors meeting held on March 27 but the IIM-A authorities waited for a couple of days to let IIM Bangalore take the lead in fee hike announcement.

Like last year, the fee hike announcement by the two IIMs will have a chain reaction and all IIMs and other B-schools are also likely to hike their fee structure soon, said a management guru who refused to be identified.

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