High aims, higher education

But such interventions have not always solved the issues or set the priorities right. Many a time they have missed the issues or even given rise to fresh ones. The recent decision of the Ministry of Human Resource Development (MHRD) to lower student fees in the Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) is an example of state intervention with confused, if not misplaced, objectives. The MHRD action is reported to be for removing or reducing elitism in education in the IIMs and thereby promoting equality in education. But the basic question is whether elitism of the IIMs is the result of higher fees at all. It is the very system of selecting the students, which favours candidates from the elite background, that is responsible for the elite nature of the student population in the IIMs rather than the high fee structure.

Lower fees would make IIM education cheaper for the elite. Thus, the step purporting to pursue equality may well be promoting inequality. Special financial assistance to the economically weak in the form of scholarships or easy loans makes sense as a measure to help the poor in this context. This is what Harvard University is reported to have done recently in reducing the financial contribution from the economically weak students. A downward revision of student fees could have had also the objective of controlling or preventing profiteering in education. The MHRD does not seem to have had this objective in lowering the student fees in the IIMs, because it is ready to increase the state grants if required.

If the downward revision of fees does not achieve the objective of pursuing equality of opportunity or checking profiteering in education, why should education in the IIMs be made cheaper? The amount of cost recovery in education through fees is to be determined by the extent of the social and private or individual returns (or gains). The private returns to IIM education (in terms of gainful employment opportunities) are so high, that one may find little reason to make IIM education cheaper, especially if it is at the cost of other levels and types of education wherein the social returns are much higher. Do the social returns to IIM education justify the existing or higher state subsidy that would render it cheaper?

Liberalism is a basic value under which the IIMs have been functioning in the country. They have been offering education to a select few at whatever cost they determined. The contents and method of education they offer have been dictated largely by the system of a liberal economy. Have the IIMs become exclusive in their student intake and in the service rendered by their human-power products to the country? If so, how are we to make the IIMs and the education they offer more socially broad based and respond to the larger societal values and goals? These are intricate issues that have their root in the competition between the different values institutionalised in our society. They cannot be resolved with ad hoc decisions on the inputs in the IIMs.

In a market driven educational system the citizens of a democracy accept state intervention to protect the rights of the less privileged to equality of opportunity and/or to maintain the quality of education. The decision of the MHRD to lower the fees in the IIMs does not have the objective of either promoting the quality of, or regulating access to, education. It is in the absence of a sound educational or social objective that the action is viewed with concern as interference with educational autonomy.

The writer teaches at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai