Professional colleges shy away from fee hike

HYDERABAD: Though many professional colleges in the state have been verbally demanding a hike in tuition fees, when it came to following a Supreme Court direction of submitting their income and expenditure reports in this regard, 90 per cent colleges shied away. More than 60 institutions and professional college management associations had filed a bunch of petitions in the Supreme Court seeking a direction to the state government to increase the tuition fee according to the increased expenditure in the past few years.Following this, the Supreme Court directed the college managements to submit their income and expenditure reports to the Admission and Fee Regulatory Committee (AFRC). Based on this direction, the department of higher education issued a notification on February 9 asking the college managements to submit audit reports for the years 2009-10 and 2010-11 along with the income and expenditure reports of the current financial year until January 2012 and gave a deadline of February 17.With the deadline ending on Friday, the AFRC informed the Andhra Pradesh State Higher Education Council (APSHEC) that they have received only 300 applications.Speaking to Express, APSHEC secretary P Sathi Reddy said that the Supreme Court will consider an increase of tuition fee for only those colleges which submitted proper reports to the AFRC. He added that out of the 3,166 professional colleges in the state, which includes 710 engineering colleges, 283 pharmacy, 625 MCA, 958 MBA, 365 M-Tech and 225 M-Pharm colleges, 2,866 colleges did not submit any report to the AFRC.However, leaders of the Engineering and Professional College Managements Association alleged that many college managements feared to submit the report as they were asked to submit the previous two years’ audit reports as well. Association secretary general KVK Rao said that the Supreme Court had asked the colleges to only submit the income and expenditure reports but the higher education department unnecessarily complicated matters by asking them to submit two years’ audit reports as well.