Scholarships versus Discounts: JKLU Scholarships are for all 4 years

 At JKLU, we have a very generous scholarship program. We are, after all, a philanthropic venture of a 125-year old very well respected industry house. The university manages its expenses not through tuition income but through the generosity of the members of JK Organization and various other well wishers.

But when we offer scholarship to a student seeking admission in one of our programs, parents often use the word "discount" for what we are doing. When we protest, they tell us that this is what every private university does. Give some discount at the time of admission to lock in the admission and then charge full fee for the remaining 2 or 3 years. The so-called scholarship is granted to may be 80% students seeking admission but the continuation of the scholarship in the 2nd year is only 5% or so.

I do not know what are the statistics of other private universities/colleges. But I thought we should have full disclosure on how our scholarships operate.

So, first of all, the rules of the scholarship every year are on our admissions website. It is absolutely clear at what performance level of 10th, 12th , JEE, UCEED or any other exam, what would be the scholarship level. We don't negotiate and would be willing to let go of a potential student than do a bargaining on scholarship (since then it would be a discount and we would be a business). There are some small components which are subjective in nature but those are decided by a committee and not by the VC or any other individual.

Our website also describes the rules for continuation of the scholarships. It clear lays down the performance level required for continuation, upgradation and downgrade of the scholarship. Again, there is no scope of interpretation or subjectivity in this. And the rules are very liberal.

Let me present the data about students who were getting scholarship in the previous academic year (2022-23) and are not graduating in 2023. This should convince people that we don't deal with just the first year discounts but our scholarships are meant to last all 3-4 years.

In 2022-23, the number of students on scholarship were 293 out of about 700 (not counting the final year students, who are graduating and who obviously cannot continue with the scholarship). The number of students who have managed the performance levels required for scholarship this year are 240. This means that 82% of the students on scholarship will continue with scholarship this year. Some with higher scholarship and some with lower scholarship and majority with the same scholarship.

In fact, at the top end of the scholarships, we have provided 100% scholarship to some students and we have often claimed that many of our students will get free education for all 3-4 years of the program. Let us look at this number. In 2022-23 academic year, the number of students getting 100% scholarship was 25 (out of 293). In 2023-24, the number of students getting 100% scholarship in this group has actually gone up to 36 (out of 240).

What we are noticing is that students from certain state boards come in with very high marks which look inflated and since we don't differentiate between boards as far as scholarship decisions are concerned, many of those students get high scholarship, but when they start studying in the university, it becomes obvious that their board performance was not reflective of their academic preparation and they lose scholarship.

If we were to only look at CBSE and Rajasthan Board students, the percentage of students that will continue with the scholarship actually is more than 90% (recall that overall, this percentage is 82%). So barring a few students who for some reason get demotivated or stop paying enough attention to the academics, almost all scholarship students do continue with the scholarship at JKLU.

So when we say that our scholarships are potentially for all 3 or 4 years, we do mean it and the data shows that as well.

All our students will be receiving their scholarship letters within the next 3-4 days. Congratulations to them for their academic performance and we do hope that they will continue with the same or even better level of performance throughout their stay at JKLU.