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A few days ago I wrote about an educational model involving intergenerational transfers. Now I came ac [...]

A reader, “P”, wrote in response to my “intergenerational transfer model for education” and said: [...]

A few days ago I wrote about an educational model involving intergenerational transfers. Now I [...]

I too have advocated full-cost pricing with the assurance that every qualified student will receive a loan for the full amount if necessary repayable over a convenient period and if the person earns in dollars, the loan amount repayable should be appropriately scaled up to reflect the higher earn power of the student. I have written about it in my article “Who Actually Paid for My Education.”

Instead, I think IITs should charge full fees for all students. In fact, this is what is done now in the self-financing engineering colleges that are common in South India. If the fees becomes so high that the education provided cannot justify the investment, the school will go out of business. The biggest obstacle for this approach is the difficulty in getting educational loans for those who cannot pay the fees.
That’s something the alumni can fix. The contributions of the alumni can act as security for the students loan and we can expect the graduates to repay the loan after their education. If this becomes a continuous process, there is a good chance that nobody will willingly default on the loan. Even if somebody defaults, only a small part of the corpus will be lost and the rest will be available for the next batch of students.

In fact, we (a group of friends) have already started something like this in a small scale for our alma mater this year. This is not a earth-shattering development but achieves the same ends – letting students study with minimal upfront fees and without any free lunch.

You have my fullest support in executing this project. Sounds good to me. If we can overcome a few narrow mindsets then we can make this work big time!

At a very fundamental level, I believe education should be extremely affordable for the student but equivalent to the highest standard in the World.

What I am wondering at this point of time is, during my engineering I was extremely ungrateful to my institute. It’s only now that a feeling of I-should-do-something keeps coming. The lack of gratitude could be a derivative of two things: Arrogance and immaturity. Things that come free with youth!

Our educational institution should aim at curing youth of these ills. That’s when we would escape the hazards of morality and adverse selection.

My two cents….

Regards,
Adi.

Chandrashekar, the point about IITians having to serve the government in return is troublesome. First, I believe that the payback system has to be flexible. For instance, imagine forcing a Vinod Khosla to serve the Indian bureaucracy instead of going to the US and becoming a star entrepreneur and VC. Khosla as an individual with the freedom to do as he chooses can do far more good than having to work in India. Having succeeded so massively, he contributed significantly to his alma mater IIT Delhi. The basic point is that one pays back for the benefits that one gains in any which way one is most capable. Second, I think that it is time that the government get out of most of it is currently involved in. Reducing the size of the government has to be a priority. The government should get out of the business of tertiary education as much as it needs to get out of bakeries and air transportation and telecom and railways and a million different areas. It has to be in law enforcement, and judiciary, and defense and other such areas. But because it is involved in all sorts of stuff that it has no business in, it makes a mess of what it has to do. For instance, the courts are so dismally run that you cannot get a quick resolution of disputes for decades on end.

I agree with you on the cheap educational loans. I had made that proposal in my article “Who Actually Paid for my Education.”

Regards,
Atanu

Another model which has been suggested is getting IITians to sign a service-agreement for a couple of years after graduation to serve the Indian goverment.

Another area which merits some attention is the cheap loans being doled out by Banks in India. Even, they could provide some rider at the time of sanctioning of loans wherein, it becomes necessary for the individual to contribute a fixed sum back to say his/her Alma-Mater or other institutions of Research.

But the scale that you are attempting and institutionalizing the practices will make a big difference. Considering the NRI numbers and geneal willingness, it should be possible once the details are in place and initial credibility is achieved.

More importantly, I think big changes can happen if there are good models (and shared knowledgebase) for individual institutions to make use of resources (however they come in).

Plus of course, how many graduates get back to teaching line- something that most of the students wish to avoid. Plus, I was reading somewhere that IIT examination system is indeed flawed which needs an overhaul. Not an engineer myself- so willing to learn from someone about that.