June and July are difficult months for many parents, with colleges reopening and admissions going on in full swing. Once admission is secured, they have to worry about bank loans, buying a computer and figure out the cheapest way to communicate with their children in the hostel.
Thankfully, a lot of this is taken care once they reach the campus. Bulk deals can be done on education loans, laptops, mobile connections and even apparel, entirely handled by student volunteers. These volunteers are generally enthusiastic ‘freshers’, guided by the seniors who would have handled similar deals in the previous year.
The negotiations start during the first week of classes and the whole process can take between six and eight weeks to complete.
The negotiation process for education loans is very comprehensive. “We normally invite quotations from a few PSU banks and then we zero-in on one bank. Some last minute negotiations take place and the deal is closed. This ensures that our students get the most competitive loan, with a moratorium period, no collateral, fixed interest rates and even monthly pocket money to cover the cost of living,” explains Vaibhav, a member of the merchandising committee at IIM- Kozhikode.
Laptop deals take a little more time. “The need to balance cost with functionality and arriving at a consensus among the student community are the biggest challenges,” says Dominic Fernando of IIM Shillong. “My biggest lesson from the whole process was getting to know some of the challenges in logistics and the trade restrictions in the North-East.” A typical transaction can run into a few crores for the larger B-Schools, all handled exclusively by students.
Vendors offer a number of sweeteners like laptop bags and free service camps, along with special deals on speakers, pen drives and calculators. A typical B-School has between 60 and 500 students on campus in a single batch, so they are looking at laptop deals running into crores every year.
Universities like the one at Manipal cater to more than 20,000 students,
although the negotiation is done by the college authorities themselves.
“We experienced the power of collective bargaining for the first time and managed to garner good discounts on the laptops,” states Vaibhav Kulkarni of SIBM, Bangalore. “We learned two important factors—one that, we had to map a large and varied group of people and arrive at a consensus acceptable by almost everyone. Second was the power of collective bargaining, which we definitely would be putting into use in the future too.”
“This experience is like an request for proposal process and taught me about vendor assessment, negotiation and selection, which are useful for the client advisory role that I play,” says Saurabh Garg, senior consultant.
So, if you’re a parent worried about your child’s education, then you just have to focus on getting them admitted to a good institute, and the system will take care of the rest.
— rohit.koshy@gmail.com