Private universities continue to flout UGC rules on fee refund

At 3 a.m., 17-year-old Akshat Gosain (name changed) stares at a blank inbox on his phone. It has been three months since he sent his first refund request to a private engineering college in Greater Noida, and the administration has stopped replying.(Sign up for THEdge, The Hindu’s weekly education newsletter.)In May, Akshat paid ₹12,500 — ₹2,500 by UPI and ₹10,000 in cash — to secure a backup seat. Government universities had not even announced their application dates yet. When Akshat later cleared another entrance exam and cancelled his enrollment, the college ignored its own online policy and kept his money.Join THEdge LinkedIn groupThe calendar clash and the private trapMany students and their families get trapped when private universities do not refund fees despite cancelling their admission. Though the exact number of students caught in refund disputes nationwide remains unknown, official regulatory figures reveal how widespread the crisis is. Prof. Mamidala Jagadesh Kumar, Chairman of the Review Committee for NEP 2020 and former UGC Chairman, confirms that “as reported in January 2025, UGC’s Fee Nivaran Cell had resolved 4,257 complaints across five academic years. These efforts resulted in refunds to students totalling over ₹25.51 crore.”Tracing the origin of this disruption, former Delhi University Teachers Association (DUTA) President Nandita Narain points out, “This has happened ever since the admission procedure has been centralised under the National Testing Agency. Since 2022, we have had this problem, because what happens is that we are dependent on the CUET exam to be held and then for the results to come, and so our calendar is determined by them. Otherwise, we never had a delay in admissions in our universities; it always happened on time, and we started our classes on time and everything.”This centralised scheduling creates severe timeline conflicts across institutions. For instance, in the 2026 academic year, Christ University conducted its entrance examination on May 11 and May 12, 2026, directly clashing with the CUET-UG 2026 window that stretched from May 11 to May 31, 2026 — leaving public university admissions and counselling in prolonged limbo across subsequent months.Autonomous private institutions exploit this regulatory gap by setting early fee cutoffs. Anxious parents pay heavy sums out of fear that public seats will not materialise. Professor of Economics and Economics of Education at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Prof. Saumen Chattopadhyay, observes that the issue is mostly confined to private sector institutions, where “the lower the quality of institutions, the greater is the propensity to trap the students and their parents.” He warns that this practice distorts student choice-making and defeats the purpose of national-level exams.Institutional autonomy and bureaucratic delaysPrivate colleges operate in a ratings economy where compliance should matter, yet accountability vanishes behind administrative walls. “Finally, all private institutions are also rated and ranked,” Prof. Abha Dev Habib, Associate Professor at Miranda House, Delhi University, said. “So for any kind of misgovernance — if this is a part of misgovernance that there is a rule and you are violating it— that violation should be enforced,” she said.Prof. Narain added that institutional centralisation strips colleges of their operational freedom: “Colleges do not have a free hand in quickly reimbursing fees if the student has cancelled the admission... We have to wait indefinitely for the university to do it. Whenever the matters are centralised and bureaucratised like that, there is always a delay.”Will new rules ensure refunds?Under statutory University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines, higher education institutions nationwide must follow a standardised fee refund policy to protect student mobility. For the 2026 academic cycle, colleges must issue a full fee refund—minus a maximum processing fee of ₹1,000—for any admissions cancelled or migrated up to October 31. For cancellations occurring after this window, institutions must revert to the 2018 UGC percentage-slab system, which scales refunds from 100% down to zero depending on the timeline. Crucially, the regulations mandate that all eligible refunds must be processed within 15 days of receiving a written application, offering a vital legal safeguard against financial exploitation.According to official UGC guidelines, colleges cannot hold onto original academic certificates or marksheets to prevent a student from leaving. If an institution misses the 15-day deadline, official UGC policy directs parents to log formal grievances on the e-Samadhan portal (samadhaan.ugc.ac.in) and the National Consumer Helpline (1915).Despite statutory UGC guidelines mandating refunds within a 15-day window, enforcement on the ground remains an uphill battle. This administrative framework is increasingly reinforced by judicial interventions, such as the Madras High Court directing a repayment of ₹1 lakh in Divya Dharshini v. The Chairman (January 2026) and the Calcutta High Court ordering a ₹9.5 lakh refund in Dr Sreeparna Ghosh v. State of West Bengal (June 2026).Prof. Kumar emphasises that systemic relief requires deeper structural reform. “After UGC issued its fee refund guidelines, a large number of students had their fees refunded, and continued follow-up, supported by proportionate action for persistent non-compliance, can further strengthen these efforts. Greater alignment of admission and counselling schedules is desirable,” he said.“UGC’s academic-calendar provisions provide a basis for working towards it. For non-professional courses covered by these provisions, first-year classes should commence no later than the first week of August. Classes for continuing students should commence no later than the third week of July. Working towards a coordinated admission and counselling framework wherever feasible, considering the requirements of different programmes and regulators is worthwhile,” he added.(Nivedhika Krishnan is a freelance journalist based in Coimbatore)