Friday, August 09, 2013

Cost of Education at IITs


"IITs say they spend Rs 3.40 lakh per student per year."

This is from a news report on how education at an IIT is subsidized to the tune of about 75%, even after a recent fee hike from Rs. 50,000 to 90,000. This factoid is also mixed up in a larger story about "financial autonomy" of of the IITs.

The student-faculty ratio in the IITs is about 16.5, according to Mr. Shashi Tharoor, the junior minister for HRD.

The teaching-related expenditure at IITs, then, is something like Rs.55 lakhs per faculty.

That's all.

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In related news, MHRD has " advised India’s central universities to increase tuition fees across all streams ..."

1 Comments:

  1. iitmsriram said...

    Well, all this is based on some simple calculations; the annual non-plan grant per (old) IIT is about 200 crores, there is additional income of some 50 crores from fees, interests, entrance exams etc giving a total "revenue" income of about 250 crores. Typical head count is 7500 students, 500 faculty members. Divide it up and one can express it as 250 crores / 7500 or 3 point something lakhs expenditure per student or 250 crores / 500 or 50 lakhs expenditure per faculty. This is only the expenditure from the revenue account; these numbers ignore the plan grants of around 150 crores (more than half of which may be currently used for building construction in most of the old IITs) and the sponsored research grants of around 200 crores. Of the 7500 students, PGs don't pay tuition fees, and another 40% of the UGs are scholarship holders who also don't pay tuition fees, so only about 2000 UGs are paying tuition. At 50K each, they contribute only 10 crores of revenue income and increasing to 90K will increase this to around 20 crores, still a small fraction of the total revenue income. On the revenue expenditure side, the salary and pension bill is the largest item at around 150 crores.