Paying the price for a low fee

The recent reports in your newspaper on college fees has done well to highlight the anomaly that plagues higher education in India. Paying a...

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The recent reports in your newspaper on college fees has done well to highlight the anomaly that plagues higher education in India. Paying a tuition fee as low as Rs 15 per month (when the same student might have been paying school fees at least ten times higher) is ridiculous. As the series shows, the student community per se, is not against a fee hike.

However, in view of many such stillborn attempts in the past, we must tread cautiously, and try to evolve a consensus before any such progressive measure is put in place. Inviting various students’ organisations for a dialogue on the issue won’t be a bad idea to begin with. It’s been my experience as that it is the organisations — cutting across party affiliations and which do not look beyond ideological dogma — which are responsible for creating this island of subsidies. They need to understand that by hiking college fees we are actually helping the cause of schoolchildren and, more specifically, primary education.

However, to expect all students seeking admission to various colleges to pay a uniform, revised fee would be unrealistic. A student studying, say, in a mofussil school in Jharkhand, cannot be expected to pay fee at a par with a student from a top-notch Delhi school. A differential fee structure, therefore, would be far more suitable. In other words, the students seeking admission into a university must be made to pay the fee they paid in school. This must be supplemented with a merit-cum-means scholarship for the students unable to pay even the bare minimum. We must also, however, use the opportunity to kick off a comprehensive debate on higher education itself.

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While being firmly committed to the philosophy that a welfare democracy cannot afford to make higher education inaccessible for its majority, we must ask ourselves a few inconvenient questions: has India erred in laying undue emphasis on higher education, thereby neglecting primary education? Do the majority, who opt for higher education, do so only because they have nothing better to do? Will the majority go for “higher education” if they were to find enough employment opportunities right after school? Shouldn’t we, then, overhaul the school curriculum instead, and make it employment oriented? Should we not junk the learning-by-rote system in favour of a creative, open-ended learning system (which must be blended with vocational education at a later stage)? Shouldn’t we take pride in our colleges, and later contribute to their growth? Why should this task be left to one Vinod Gupta here or one Nandan Nilkeni there? Why can’t college/university alumni associations sponsor poor students, or pitch in, in a myriad other ways?

The problem is that we tend to constrict education into a straitjacket far too often. Education, for most of us, is merely a bread-and-butter issue. Gandhi, Tagore, Freire, and many others, however, have said that education, or the process of learning, must help one graduate from a “particularistic” existence to a “universalistic” existence. The classroom must facilitate this process.