Last year, Goa Institute of Management (GIM) shifted to a new 50-acre campus located at the foothills of the Western Ghats at Sanquelim in north Goa. The entire project cost a whopping Rs 63 crore, according to director Peter FX DLima. He also said that for the incoming Post Graduate Programme (PGP) batch of 2012-14, GIM had hiked up the per term tuition fees by almost 120%, which will result in the total course fee going up from Rs 5.5 lakh to Rs 9 lakh (all rounded-off numbers as quoted by the director).
The college follows a trimester system and the two-year course structure is divided into six terms, for which the tuition fee used to be Rs 45,500 for each term. Now, it has become Rs 1,00,000 per term, a more than double increase. The admission fee has been hiked from Rs 15,000 to 25,000 while the library and IT service fee per term is now Rs 12,000 instead of the earlier Rs 8,500.
According to the institute, the architecture is modern and conforms to the topography of the area. The academic buildings have air-conditioned halls with LCD projectors, including a classroom with facilities for interactive sessions with faculty who are at distant locations.
The hostel fee has also been hiked by a margin of Rs 500. The single occupancy room fee per term used to be Rs 9,000, which is Rs 9,500 now and double occupancy room fee became Rs 7,000 from Rs 6,500. The admission fee to the hostel has been raised from Rs 10,500 to Rs 12,000.
When PaGaLGuY asked current GIM students about their reaction to the hike, almost all of them thought that the fee hike was ‘reasonable’. According to Cedric Menezes, a second year PGP student, Being a private non-profit organisation the fees is the only source of funds. It might change the good return on investment image of GIM initially, but with time will justify itself. It is one of the top emerging schools in India and funds are required to sustain this momentum, he said.
The campus now also has coin-operated washing and drying launderette machines. All internal payments are made as cashless transactions using Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) cards, which also enable students to mark their attendance and to have books issued from the library 24×7 without the support of a librarian. The school now has an outdoor football field and jogging track besides basketball, volleyball and tennis courts. Indoor facilities comprise badminton court, table tennis and gymnasium.
Even though it may appear that the fee hike is because of all the added facilities and infrastructure at the new campus, GIM director Peter FX DLima however attributes the hike to the current market price of an MBA. “It is because of the way the current market is. While fixing a price, one must also keep in mind the supply and demand of the product. When we started this project, we realised that our fees were lower than those of other competitor b-schools. Everyone had hiked their fee and we were lagging behind. The infrastructure part is only incidental. The infrastructure was improved just to offer the students more than the value of what they were paying,” he stresses.
Final year PGP student Hitesh Parwani says that it is tough for a student to shell out almost double the amount than what it was, but he also adds, “I dont think one should compare the current fee structure with what it was earlier. The last campus in Ribandar, near Panjim was really small, and this one is really huge and lavish. If you compared the area, facilities, activites, infrastructure between the two campuses, then the hike is justified.”