With the board exams over and students preparing for competitive exams, institutions offering crash courses in the city — particularly for NEET — are doing thriving business. While there are several coaching centres for competitive exams such as IIT-JEE and AIIMS exams, gauging the demand for NEET courses, several institutes had aggressively started advertising their crash courses in advance. Several NEET coaching centres have come up in the past one year at Saibaba Colony, Gandhipuram an
Avinashi Road.
The increase in demand has also increased the fee for such courses. While some NEET coaching centres in the city charge Rs 10,000 for a month-long crash course, others have fixed the fee at Rs 35,000.
However, when asked about the services and facilities provided by the centres, which justify their fee, all centres say the fee covers the cost of course materials and worksheets.
Representatives from some NEET coaching centres said they had full-time faculty, who demand Rs 40,000 to Rs 60,000 per month as salary. “This would definitely reflect in the course fee. This is justified, as having full-time faculty is essential for giving quality coaching,” said a representative from a NEET coaching centre at R S Puram. Several such centres had college professors as part-time faculty.
Representatives of some coaching centres such as
Dearc Academy said they also gave scholarships to students based on their performance. “While the fee for our crash course is Rs 18,000, we have brought down the fee to Rs 14,000 for some students under our scholarship scheme,” said
Gowtham Mohankumar, administrative officer of the Coimbatore branch of Dearc Academy.
Some coaching centres have hiked the fee based on the results they produced in the previous years. Good results create a brand value for such centres, said the representative of a coaching centre.
