Madras University ups fees for affiliation, IDE courses

Chennai: To tide over the financial crisis, the Madras University has increased fees for course affiliation and other services rendered to the self-financing colleges besides hiking fees for distance education programmes.

However, the university has not increased any fees for UG or PG regular students studying in the affiliated colleges as well as university departments.

The syndicate members of the university have authorised the vice-chancellor to increase these fee structures last week.  

“We have revised fees on two counts - the affiliation and recognition related fees for affiliated colleges and the services rendered to them like approval of qualification, scrutiny of autonomous application and process fee for new applications,” said P. Duraisamy, vice-chancellor of University of Madras.

These fee structures were not revised for more than a decade, even though the number of affiliated colleges and number of courses offered in each of these colleges and the students enrollment have all increased substantially in these years.

The university would introduce online application and admission to MPhil programme from next academic year.

As far as distance mode courses are concerned the university has increased fees for the courses which are in demand.

“Except for MBA, the tuition fee for other courses was increased nominally. Even after the increase of our fees, when compared to other universities our course fee is still very much low,” Professor Duraisamy said.

Tuition fee was nominally increased for six courses including B.Com, BBA and MSc (Pscyhology). The tuition fee for MBA alone increased over 50 per cent.

Besides tuition fee, the university increase application fee, admission fee and postage fee. University officials said the tuition fees and other fees was not revised for last two decades and for courses with personal contact programmes, the university is actually incurring loss except few programmes.

The university is planning to rise over Rs 10 crore by the fees hike.

“The university likely to receive Rs 36 crore funds from the state government towards salary grant for the year 2016-17. Due to implementation of sixth pay commission, the university’s financial burden has increased.  The university is having just enough resources to pay the salary of the faculty and pension. The available funds are not enough to give the retirement benefits to the staff members. We need to take this measure to recover the university from its current financial crisis,” said P. Duraisamy.

Syndicate members and professors from Madras University blamed the previous vice-chancellors for current financial mess.

“The unmindful spending by the previous vice-chancellors of the university on the buildings has crippled the university financially. The implementation of 6thpay commission further burdened the university’s financial resources,” syndicate members said.

“Institute of Distance Education in University of Madras was one of the main resources for the university. Due to the surplus revenue generated by IDE courses, the university administration has not increased any fees for the last ten years whereas the administrative costs like salary and other things have witnessed manifold increase,” they added. But, the UGC has restricted the state universities to conduct the ODL (Open and Distance Learning courses) within their jurisdiction and the revenue has been curtailed in the past few years forcing the university to increase the fees.