Uniform fee may dilute brand IIM

While the directors of the six Indian Institutes of Management hammer out a solution to evolve a consensus on the fee cut issue, a uniform fee structure across all the six IIMs might not be favourable, but a fee structure for needy students will be common across the institutes.

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It is not clear whether the financial package offered by the government will be acceptable to all the institutes considering that the institutes are at "different development stages", according to sources at IIM Kolkata.

The smaller IIMs at Indore, Lucknow and Kozhikode will have a greater dependence on the government unlike those at Ahemdabad, Bangalore and Kolkata, who are "not averse" to the idea of supporting themselves if the government directs them to do so.

Sources also said the bigger IIMs had the option of funding through alumni associations or their corpus funds, which were greater than that of the smaller institutes.

A uniform fee structure might not be suitable considering the price differential across the institutes, sources added.

Meaning that a student eligible for all the IIMs might prefer the one which offers the course at a lower cost assuming that the IIM was a "brand" in itself cutting across all the six institutes.

There is a "gap" in terms of financing patterns, expenditure priorities, which cannot be bridged between the two groupings simply because the bigger ones have existed longer than the new ones. The institutes were governed by different dictates, it might not be possible to have a common uniform fee structure, said sources.