SC’s ban on mid-term fee hikes highlights India’s professional education crisis

Imagine this. Your daughter gets into a B.Tech programme.

You have calculated the expenses: ₹44,000 per semester, paid the first semester and taken a loan for the rest. Four months later, the college tells you: the fee is now ₹60,500, plus a “development fee” nobody mentioned earlier.

That’s 37.5% more, mid-course. Where do you go?That’s what happened to students at an engineering college in West Bengal in 2023.

On October 14, 2026, the Supreme Court upheld the refund of extra fees and laid down a simple rule: tell students the fee for the entire course before they join, and don’t increase it midway except in exceptional circumstances. Courts have stepped in earlier as well.

In 2022, the Andhra Pradesh High Court quashed the State government order of a seven-fold MBBS fee hike to ₹24 lakh a year. It was affirmed by the Supreme Court.

Even the All India Council for Technical Education’s (AICTE) 1994 rules mandate the announcement of the entire course fees in advance. This keeps happening because of the lack of implementation of these rules.The Supreme Court noted that parents spend about 46.7% of their yearly expenses on a professional course for a child, and that fee is 711% higher than general courses.

But why are parents, in the first place, willing to pay such high fees? The answer is simple: for millions of middle-class families in India, getting a child into a professional course — be it engineering, medicine, management, or law — isn’t just an educational milestone.

It is a lifeline.Professional programs provide specialised skills, offer attractive job pathways, bank loans, and, importantly, campus placements. Due to stiff competition in centrally funded government institutions, families are left with no other choice but to turn to private colleges.

High fees for them are not a luxury, but the price of the promise of a good job.Who regulates the fees and how?Practices in Central and State institutions vary. Tuition fees for the 23 IITs are determined by the IIT Council.

Fees for MBBS at AIIMS, JIPMER, and central universities are determined by the respective governing councils. Their decisions are driven by a heavily subsidised public policy model.

Individual IIMs set their own fees.In 2003, the Supreme Court mandated statutory Fee Regulatory Committees (FRCs) in every State to approve fee structures before admissions. Even after 23 years, barring a handful, most of the States do not have statutorily constituted FRCs.

Deemed universities and State private universities largely decide their own fees. Then there are several professional courses like diplomas and certificates, that do not fall under any regulatory purview.The State FRCs, in operation, primarily work on a cost-plus model based on the cost details, which are mostly infrastructure-related, submitted by the institutions.

Many private colleges charge students hefty fees but employ temporary teachers or pay them below University Grants Commission (UGC) scales.To help marginalised sections of society, several States run fee reimbursement schemes, which often face implementation hurdles, leading to chronic pay-out backlogs. After waiting for some time, private colleges resort to withholding hall tickets or mark sheets, turning a well-intentioned initiative into a source of stress for students and parents.Delays in fee refunds for withdrawalsDue to competition for premier colleges and lack of alignment of admission calendars across the institutions, some students are forced to shift colleges after paying fees.

As per the UGC policy, students who withdraw by 30th September should get a full refund, and those by 31st October lose at most ₹1,000.But these rules are practiced more in breach than in reality. A few aggrieved students complain on the UGC e-Samadhan portal while several others suffer silently.

As per the UGC, about 4,100 fee refund-related complaints were resolved in five academic years ending 2024-25, and ₹25.51 crore was refunded to the students, with 80% of them involving private institutions. Defaulting universities rarely face severe penalties.Way forwardTo address these issues, there is a need for structural changes – policy, implementation and enforcement.

All institutions must be mandated to publish the fees for the entire course duration well before admissions season starts, outlawing “provisional fee” admissions.There is a need to move away from cost-plus-based fee fixation and link the fee caps to graduate outcomes and academic quality accreditations. Ensure state fee reimbursements go through direct, automated channels so that students are not held hostage by bureaucratic delays.

When students face mediocre teaching or unauthorised fee demands, current redressal mechanisms remain fragmented.As recommended by the Supreme Court in T.M.A. Pai Foundation v.

State of Karnataka in 2002, specialised Educational Tribunals may be set up as a single judicial window to address the grievances in a time-bound manner. The lapsed Educational Tribunals Bill, 2010, passed in the Lok Sabha but stalled in the Rajya Sabha, may be revived.In the current AI age, professional courses matter more than ever before.

Fairness, transparency, and equity are not favours to students. They are what it takes to build India’s future skilled workforce.(Professor O R S Rao is the Chancellor of the ICFAI University, Sikkim.

Views are personal)