High fees in private medical colleges account for low quality intake
Reema Nagarajan
| TNN | Updated: Apr 21, 2018, 02:39 IST
Highlights
The student with the highest NEET marks among those admitted into the private university had lower marks than the last student admitted to the open category in each of the government colleges.
In the private university, the fees for the MBBS course are Rs 64 lakh compared to just Rs 4 lakh in the government colleges.

There are only 60,000-odd MBBS seats in India, so how does someone ranked 4 lakh or more in NEET get admission even if he or she qualified? With all colleges having to go by the NEET ranking in admissions, this seems an impossible situation, but the high fees charged by most private colleges make it possible. That topples merit by forcing thousands of students with high scores to forego seats, allowing poor performers with money to get admission.
Take admissions to colleges Punjab for instance — eight of them under the Baba Farid University of Health Sciences, three government run and four private ones and a private university.
The student with the highest NEET marks among those admitted into the private university had lower marks than the last student admitted to the open category in each of the government colleges. In the private university, the fees for the MBBS course are Rs 64 lakh compared to just Rs 4 lakh in the government colleges. While data for all states was not available, a similar pattern was evident in Tamil Nadu as well.
In fact, even within private institutions, those who got into the government quota of private colleges had the best scores, while private universities saw candidates with much lower scores gaining admission. It’s no coincidence that the tution fees for the government quota in private colleges is fixed at Rs 4 lakh for the course compared to roughly a crore in the private universities. To get a better sense of how exorbitant fees are lowering the standards of intake in medical colleges, consider this.

If all 60,000-odd seats were in government colleges, where the fees are not prohibitive, the last rank to get in would have been at worst in the range of 80,000 even assuming that one-third of the top 60,000 ranks opted out for various reasons. The 80,000th rank in NEET 2017 had a percentile score of about 92.6 and marks of 399 out of 720, or about 55.4%. Experts have suggested 1:3 as the ideal seats to eligible students ratio. That would have meant fixing the percentile cut-off so that about 1.8 lakh qualify.