Supreme Court bars mid-term fee hikes in professional courses except in extraordinary circumstances

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.

“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. Narasimha and Alok Aradhe held.

The court said mid-stream fee hikes were impermissible except under unforeseeable or extraordinary economic conditions or statutory changes.

Fee-fixation committees must function as continuing institutions, capable of anticipating costs, undertaking periodic assessments, and making timely decisions.

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.

The verdict said the legitimate interest of students and parents to have certainty about the reasonable fee payable for the course must be balanced with the interest of self-financing educational institutions to secure adequate resources for providing quality education and improving standards.

The court clarified that it was not against periodic fee revision.

“If such cost is not recovered from the students at the relevant time and is deferred to future batches, an inevitable revenue deficit would certainly arise and will either have a cascading effect on future batches or adversely affect the economic viability of the institution. It will have its own fallout on the infrastructure, quality of lecturers and professors, and also adversely affect student welfare,” the judgment explained.

Fee certainty through efficient regulation is the paramount principle. There should be a sense of predictability about the financial liability of higher education. The authorities must notify the fee payable for the entire course before a student takes admission, the court said.

The judgment, authored by Justice Narasimha, noted National Sample Survey Office data showed that professional course fees were a staggering 711% higher than those for general academic programmes.

“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.

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.

“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.