VGSOM to hike tuition fees by 150%

Vinod Gupta School of Management (VGSOM) at IIT-Kharagpur is increasing the tuition fees for its flagship two-year postgraduate MBA programme by 150 per cent from the next academic year (July 2010) to fund infrastructure expansion and other expenses.

A Tripathy, dean, VGSOM, told Business Standard, “We will hike the fees for our flagship two-year postgraduate MBA programme from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 5 lakh from July 2010. But we have decided to offer between 50 per cent and 100 per cent fee waivers to 25 per cent students of the 120-strong batch. This will be need-based and will be calculated on the basis of a student’s family income, among other benchmarks.”

 

VGSOM is of the opinion that most of the other management institutes within IITs are charging much higher fees. A few of them charge as much as Rs 8 lakh. “We are in the process of improving our infrastructure too, and expenses have been increasing, therefore the decision to hike fees,” said Tripathy.

Among other plans, VGSOM will introduce two executive MBA programmes from next academic year, one exclusively for IT professionals, to be offered at the IIT’s extension campus at Bhubaneswar, and the other a general executive course, to be taught at the Kolkata campus. Both will be three-year courses. Classes will be held in the evenings on weekends through video conferencing and classroom lectures. These will be non-residential executive education courses.

“We are planning to start management development programmes (MDPs), more international tie-ups and faculty training. So, we are in talks with Essec, France; the management school of Institute of Maryland, US; management school at Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok; and a few others. The tie-ups are mainly for faculty exchange programmes. We also intend to start courses on study of chemical and process industries, and we feel international tie-ups for specialised training would help,” Tripathy added.

VGSOM is also increasing its PhD scholars. The institute currently has 40 PhD students and over 20 faculty. We are also increasing participation by its faculty in conferences overseas for paper presentation, to ensure better exposure for them.

VGSOM was established in 1993 and was the first management school to be setup within the IIT system. It was initiated by a distinguished alumnus and a Life Time Fellow of the Institute, Vinod Gupta, whose generous endowment was matched by support from the government of India.