The Hindu Business Line : <i>Status quo ante</i> on IIM fees

IT SHOULD OCCASION no surprise that the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) have one after the other resolved to maintain the status quo ante on their fee structure. For IIM-Ahmedabad, it was a reiteration of the stand it had taken all along, made easier by the change in the ruling dispensation at the Centre which is only too keen to distance itself from the some of the more controversial decisions of its predecessor. As for the rest, the latest policy stance is yet another manifestation of toeing the official line. If the signals emanating from official quarters earlier suggested a fee cut, the Boards promptly complied; and now if the official stance is for maintaining the old fee structure, they see virtue in that too. The promise of a higher allocation of money towards scholarships has made the decision politically more acceptable.

Both IIM-Calcutta and IIM-Indore, which had reversed their earlier stands, have not bothered to explain to the public what brought about the change in their thinking. IIM-Ahmedabad too needs to tell the public why it is only this year that it is conscience-stricken that monies meant for it are better spent by the Government on more pressing programmes of social development. The silence of these institutions has only reinforced a widely-held perception that they view the whole episode as simply a matter between themselves and the Government, to be resolved internally, without involving the public. It is ironic that the managements of these institutions, which advocate for corporates a concept of stakeholder that extends beyond the shareholders, should not apply it to their own situation.

That apart, broader questions still remain unanswered. What should be the governing principle in the determination of fees by publicly-endowed management institutions? While the notion that it should be left to market forces has a certain intuitive appeal, the commercialisation of higher education — as adherence to this principle must necessarily imply — would leave a lot of people uncomfortable. The notion that fees should be so structured as to rope in meritorious students belonging to the disadvantaged sections in larger numbers is not without merit. According to an internal assessment done at IIM-Calcutta, the average family income of the students passing out this year was Rs 5 lakh. While this may at first sight mean that fee affordability is not an issue for students aspiring for management education, it could be argued with some force that the phenomenon actually indicates that there are barriers, hidden or otherwise, to entry into management institutes that see only affluent students getting admission, in contrast to engineering education at the IITs, where the profile of students is a lot more egalitarian.

If academic excellence at the higher secondary level and in under-graduate programmes is distributed across students hailing from different economic strata, it should be a matter of concern if this is not reflected in the profiles of students seeking admission to B-schools, as the IIM-Calcutta study indicates. The Dr Joshi-inspired directive of the Government may have been politically motivated. But that is no reason to shut out a meaningful debate on the broader issues that his fee cut proposal had generated.