TU fee hike

Various student unions have threatened strike if the Tribhuvan University (TU) does not withdraw its decision to hike fees at graduate and undergraduate levels. The university board has decided to raise the tuition fee by a whopping twelve-fold to cope up with the university’s deepening financial crises. The mess that the TU is in today only reflects the deep rot in the public education system of our country. The monthly fee at the graduate level is so low that you cannot buy a decent lunch with it. But then the quality of education is so poor that a TU graduate is worth nothing in the job market. No one knows how to get out of this mess and even if there is a plan to overhaul the system, we don’t have the necessary resources nor do we seem to have the political will to implement it. It would be naive to attempt to solve TU’s problems, accumulated over time and worsened by gross neglect of successive governments, at one go. In such a case, the wisest approach is to take just one step at a time.



We see the fee hike as the first step in the long – and perhaps a painful – journey that the TU must go through. About 12-fold increase in the tuition fee sounds like an awful lot and it really is. But remember that TU hasn’t raised fees for the last 18 years! During this time, costs of education to health to living have gone through the roof. After the fee hike, a graduate student in TU will have to pay Rs 700 per month and a student at an undergraduate level will have to pay Rs 400. Keeping higher education fees low or even making it completely free pays off so long as the state can offer quality education and produce a workforce that can contribute to the nation’s productivity. What is happening in our case is that the students enroll themselves for progressively higher level of education just because the cost is so low. But, at the end, they only push up the unemployment rate; this is bad economics and a bad social policy.



In a resource-strapped society like ours, there is an opportunity cost for every rupee of investment. There are ample empirical evidences which suggest that in a society with low literacy rates, the rate of return on investment in primary education is much higher than investments made at any other level. When there are children who still don’t get to go to school or are forced to dropout after a few months or years of school education, it makes sense to invest in primary education than to subsidize the low-quality, unproductive higher education. It’s time to make smart choices.

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