The Naveen Patnaik Government has failed to tame the soaring higher education fees in the State. let alone private institutions, even the Government and aided colleges are not lagging behind in the race of fee hike.
For an example, the Council of Higher Secondary Education (CHSE), in a recent notice to all its affiliating colleges, has almost doubled the Return of Matriculates (ROM) fees from this academic session, hitting hard thousands of poor, SC, ST and Dalit students of the State. While there is no common ceiling on the fees taken by individual colleges in the State, the hike of the CHSE fees at the time of admission has again served as a blow to the poor students seeking Plus II education.
Already the Government and aided colleges have jacked up their internal fees over the last few years with the result that the overall admission charges, coupled with the share of the CHSE, have gone too high. Not to speak about the urban based colleges, even the fees of rural colleges have gone high and not within the riches of the poor students. In the rural based colleges the admission fees which were limited to a few hundreds, a decade ago, are now being collected in thousands. In some colleges the fees are as high as `5,000-`7,000, said sources.
The woes of the students do not end here. For, it worsens further with re-admission, form fill-up, fines and several other fees collected during the two years of the course. Consequently, by the time, a student completes Plus II education, he is made to cough up `10,000 to `15,000.
“We prefer local colleges instead of the ones far from us for financial constraint. But now that we feel the fees in the local colleges too are no less,” rued a few Plus II arts aspirants in a rural college in Dhenkanal district.
When asked, a Principal of an aided college said, “Already the CHSE fees have grown two-fold this year. Besides, the college has to collect its own fees for maintenance and several expenses under different heads since it gets no financial assistance from the Government to run its collateral expenses except meeting staff salary.”