Students In Distress: Pay Up Or Perish

- Team Careers360

Students being harried by unscrupulous pri-vate institutions to extort money by playing with their life appears to be a norm rather than an exception these days. Fazal Mohammad (name changed to protect identity) shares his ordeal with Careers360. “I joined B.E. Electronics and Communication Engineering course at Dhanalakshmi Srinivasan College of Engineering, Coimbatore in 2017. My original documents were submitted at the time of admission. Disillusioned with the college, a few months later, I decided to discontinue my studies here. To my shock, the college asked me to pay tuition fee for all four years and is not returning my original documents. I have been running from one department to other for the past two years without any avail.” Raj Kumar (name changed to protect identity), a student of Sri Venkateswara College of Engineering, Tirupati faces a similar situation. “I am so devastated,” he says. “Kindly help me to get my problem resolved,” he pleads.

Flouting norms with impunity

Fazal and Raj are not isolated cases. There are hundreds of students like them. This happens even when educational institutions are bound by AICTE and the UGC rules to return original certificates to the students when they discontinue their studies, albeit with some stipulations. In 2018, Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnataka sent circulars to over 200 affiliated colleges to return original certificates upon completion of the admission process. All these colleges were found to have flouted the norms in this regard. However, only a few students like Fazal and Raj have the patience to continue their fight with the authorities. In most cases, students bow down to the pressure as changing college or course would otherwise require dropping a year. In many cases, they continue with the course, knowing fully that their future may not be the one they set out for.