Much to the relief of families sacrificing their life savings for professional education, the Supreme Court has ruled that students enrolling in professional courses must know their exact expenses from the outset.
Narasimha and Alok Aradhe held. The court clarified that it was not against periodic fee revision. The court spoke for millions of parents who struggle to pay for their children’s professional courses. Many families also rely on student loans to pay for higher education. It would be good governance for the State to create an ecosystem of certainty about the financial obligation families must undertake to acquire professional qualifications.
Both the All India Council for Technical Education Regulations, 1994, and the National Education Policy, 2020, offer regulatory frameworks that pre-empt arbitrary fee increases by self-financing higher educational institutions while preserving legitimate fiscal space for them, the court added.
“A student entering a four-year or five-year professional programme like medicine or engineering should ordinarily know, at the very threshold, the financial liability that they or their family is undertaking,” a Bench of Justices P.S. The court said mid-stream fee hikes were impermissible except under unforeseeable or extraordinary economic conditions or statutory changes. “For the overwhelming majority of households, the fee payable for a professional course constitutes a substantial part of the family’s income and savings; it is not a matter of incidental expenditure,” the court observed. “Adverse variations in financial commitment, and the insecurities that it may create, will impact the student and the family, and, in the long run, have an adverse effect on the quality and character of the professionals that are in the making,” the apex court cautioned.
