he government run Quaid+Azam University (QAU) has increased its fee by up to 50 pc. QAU, which has always remained a popular choice for middle class, high achieving students, raised their Ph.D fee by up to 50pc.

According to the fee structure on their website, fees for Ph.D was Rs41, 638 in the spring of 2014 while fees for fall 2015 has been hiked up to Rs62, 622.

Fee for M.phil has seen an increase of 33 pc. Students had to pay Rs38, 883 per semester for M.Phil in the spring of 2014 while they have to fork out Rs51,660 this year.

A 28pc increase was seen in fee for M.Sc and MBA programmes while a 25pc raise was decided for their undergraduate degrees with students now having to pay Rs59, 200 per semester.

A student of the university said, `We are troubled over this unprecedented fee hike. This is a public sector university and fee should not be increased by more than 10pc annually.

Some students while talking to Dawn said they requested the federal government to take notice of this fee hike by the university. One student said, `We appreciate the federal government for taking an action against elite schools when they were charging increased fee. The same action should be taken against any public sector institute for drastically increasing their fee.

When Dawn tried to get a statement from QAU`s Vice Chancellor Javed Ashraf, he refused to discuss the issue.

When asked what the rationale behind the massive hike was he said, `I`ll not give you my view point on this issue`.

According to the HEC guidelines, universities cannot increase fee by more than 10pc annually. The HEC chairman, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, said he was told by QAU administration that they had increased the fee on average by 15 pc and that too after two years.

He said, `In three departments they increased fee by 20pc.

I will look into the matter.