Knowledge comes with a price tag.
If you cannot afford the cost.
You are denied the opportunity to seek it.
We often find ourselves in a cycle where poverty inherits poverty, and wisdom is bartered as a luxury rather than being dispensed as a birthright.
Education is a bridge between poverty and opportunity. But that bridge almost always has a cost.
This financial burden continues to grow relentlessly from the moment you first enter a school, all the way until you get a job. And the amount is almost impossible for many families to ignore, as every year adds another layer of expenses in the form of fees, books, uniforms, transportation, and additional academic support.
Education has gradually become an industry over the years, and the sector has now become increasingly privatised.
The Math Behind the Barrier
In India, this systemic crisis strikes hardest at the bottom 50% of the population, a massive lower-income demographic left to scramble for a mere 15% of the national income pool.
The ground reality is that nearly a quarter of the country still gets by on less than ₹350 a day.
For these households, trying to afford escalating private school fees and buying overpriced textbooks are financially crippling activities, serving as a brutal reminder that a child’s educational future is determined entirely by their parents’ bank balance.
The rich are not being criticised here; instead, a system is being brought into question where education, a basic human right, has become a commodity.
A child at the lowest level of society is not being outcompeted. They are directly being disqualified before they can even step onto the field. Cut them off from basic literacy and logic, and they never get a fair chance to discover what their own hard work could achieve.
The Illusion of Support
When confronted with these costs, the system points to government schools and student scholarships as the ultimate solutions.
These systems are meant to ensure that no child is denied an education because of financial hardship. But on the ground, these government schools are left underfunded, and the scholarships meant to rescue lower-income students are often delayed by bureaucracy, swallowed by red tape, or simply too small to cover the real cost of living and learning.
If education is truly a fundamental right, then access to it should be expanding, not shrinking. This was not visible in the actions of the government when they decided to merge thousands of government primary schools in Uttar Pradesh last year. Although the policy was introduced to optimise resources and improve efficiency, many parents and educators argued that increasing the distance between children and their nearest school risked creating yet another barrier to education.
Government schools and colleges were established with a purpose to ensure that education remains accessible and affordable to everyone regardless of a person’s economic background, which clearly isn’t the case anymore in modern-day India.
The Government-Funded Institution: Lucknow University
This year, Lucknow University witnessed one of its most significant fee revisions during the 2026 admission cycle, increasing undergraduate admission form fees by 50 per cent after sixteen years, alongside substantial hikes in several self-financed courses.It is understandable that after so many years, the revision in fees is normal. But what is not normal is increasing them to such an extent that, in several self-financed courses, the semester fees have nearly doubled.
The semester fee for B.Sc. (Self-Finance) increased from ₹13,580 to ₹26,330, while the Integrated LL.B. programme rose from ₹26,080 to ₹47,330. B.Com (Self-Finance) saw its fee increase from ₹15,830 to ₹22,732, BBA from ₹6,380 to ₹13,500, and B.Voc. (Renewable Energy) from ₹6,880 to ₹13,500.
These were not minor revisions introduced to keep pace with inflation but steep increases that raised serious concerns about the affordability of higher education in a government-funded institution.
The institution’s perspective on this was –
- The revision was necessary after sixteen years of unchanged admission form fees and increasing operational costs.
Understandable. Universities cannot be expected to function efficiently without adequate financial resources.
- Maintaining infrastructure, paying staff, upgrading laboratories, expanding academic programmes, and ensuring the smooth functioning of a university of this scale require substantial financial resources.
That may be true, but should students be expected to compensate for institutional financial constraints? In a government-funded university, ensuring proper funding is ultimately the responsibility of the state, not the students who seek an affordable education.
- Government scholarships and fee reimbursement schemes are available for eligible students, and financial assistance continues to exist for those who need it.
This argument itself assumes that every student can first afford to enter the institution. Because here’s a reality check: scholarships rarely cover the entire cost of pursuing a degree. And more importantly, a scholarship is not available at the point of admission.
Before a student can benefit from any financial assistance, they must first secure admission, pay the required fees, and bear the initial expenses themselves. For many families, it is this upfront cost that becomes the greatest barrier, long before any scholarship amount is credited. And if the institution has forgotten how efficiently it has handled the scholarship process, let me remind them that in 2024, hundreds of Lucknow University students protested after alleging that their scholarship applications had not been forwarded by the university to the Social Welfare Department within the prescribed timeline, leaving many students without the financial assistance they depended on.
- The university faced a budget deficit (reported at around ₹72 crore), and the revised fees for self-financed courses would help generate additional revenue to reduce this gap.
A ₹72 crore deficit cannot be ignored. But neither can the purpose of a government-funded university. Students are not responsible for balancing institutional finances.
Government-funded institutions are to provide accessibility to education at a lower cost. It represents the idea that quality education should not be limited to those who can afford high fees.
Public funding exists to ensure that students from different economic backgrounds can access education at a reasonable cost while benefiting from proper infrastructure, qualified faculty, and academic opportunities.
The university’s financial challenges cannot be denied, but the solution cannot be to continuously transfer the burden onto students.
Education is the soul of a nation, which transforms a population into a collective force of intellect that leads the nation towards progress.
Literacy serves as the foundation of equality so that a child born into hardship can stand with equal dignity and opportunity.
“Education should be free, and if not, it should be available at the lowest cost possible.” That is what a government must ensure.
