Colleges must disclose their fee, hostel facilities, scholarships and accreditation: UGC

From now on, all universities, colleges and Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) across India will have to disclose their fee structure, national ranking, fee refund policy, hostel facilities, scholarship programs and other details on their official website.

The initiative is being taken by the University Grants Commission (UGC) to bring more transparency and ensure that students are not misled.

For this, the UGC has made a ‘Minimum-Mandatory Disclosure’ regulation under which the HEIs will also disclose their National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) rankings.

Professor M Jagadesh Kumar, Chairman, UGC told IANS, “Of late different stakeholders in the higher education system like prospective students, parents, research scholars, government officials, alumni and the public at large desire to seek certain basic information from the websites of different Universities/HEIs.

“We have found that the websites of several universities lack basic minimum information related to their institute and many times their websites are not functional or updated.

“At this defining moment, when we are celebrating the third year of the National Education Policy 2020, it would be prudent to desire that HEIs provide basic minimum information and updated content on their websites.

“Hence, we have prepared a checklist of this information to be provided by the universities on their websites.”

The UGC has prepared a detailed document on the information that needs to be disclosed on the websites of the HEIs, which it will make public in a few days for feedback. The UGC has sent this document to all institutions.

The document states that the ‘Minimum Mandatory Disclosure’ rule for HEIs will mandate that the institutions have an ‘About us’ page, Act and Statutes or MoA and information regarding the Institutional Development Plan, Annual Reports, Constituent Units, Affiliated Colleges, Off-campus and Off-shore campus.

According to the UGC the universities and colleges will also have to upload details of their accreditation and nation rankings, and have profiles of senior administrative officials like the Chancellor, Vice Chancellor, Pro-Vice Chancellor and Registrar, etc.

The institutions will also be required to upload details of academic programs, academic calendar, schools/departments/centres, faculty details with photographs, admissions and fee along with other important details, the UGC added.