Cost Sharing in Higher Education

As already mentioned, reducing the burden of educational finance by adopting reforms in generation of resources has been the thrust of the government.

One way of doing this is to reduce the subsidy to institutions. Although the desire to take recourse to this move has been expressed by the government in its various policy statements of intentions even for elementary education, the idea of cost sharing is popularly effected (even in developed countries) mainly in respect of higher/ professional education courses/programmes. Cost sharing is thus a method by which the burden of financing the educational programmes is passed on to the beneficiaries like households, industries and the recipients (i.e. students) themselves.

Depending on the group to which the method targets, the recovery pattern of the cost of education is spelt out. The important methods which have been popularly debated/ tried are the following.

1. Increasing the Fees
2. Discriminatory Fee Structure
3. Graduate Tax
4. Student Loans