How Shalyam verifies college fees (and how you can check any fee yourself)

On Shalyam, a fee is shown as verified only after someone submits the number with proof and a trained reviewer confirms it against that proof. This article walks through that process and gives you the same steps to use on any college’s own website.

College fees are not a single number on a blog post. They are a line in an official notice: tuition, hostel, caution money, and other charges, usually for one academic year. If you cannot see the notice and the year, you cannot know whether the figure is current.

Summary

• Shalyam does not invent fees from forums or third-party lists; contributors attach a link or file from the college or government.
• A reviewer checks that the proof opens, matches the submitted course and year, and is not a personal document with student details.
• Approved fees appear with a source and last verified date; unverified or contributor-only data is labelled clearly.
• You can verify any college fee yourself in about five minutes using its official site.
• Pages with enough verified facts can be shown to search engines; until then they stay out of Google by design.

Why “verified” matters for fees

In India, universities and colleges are expected to publish a prospectus that includes each fee component before admissions. Regulators and state fee bodies can also cap or approve fees for certain courses. That is the legal background—but as a student or parent you still face a practical problem: aggregators and social posts rarely cite the exact notice for your college and year.

Shalyam is built around one rule: if a number is shown as verified, you can open the source and see why we trust it.

This isn't only a fees problem. Looking at our own search data, the questions people actually type about a college are rarely about money at all. In the period we have on file, the single most common patterns are things like "is [college] private or government", "[college] affiliated to which university", "[college] which district", "started in which year", and "does [college] have hostel facility" — plain registry facts, not fee amounts. Fee-specific searches barely register by comparison. Most of that searching happens on a phone, not a laptop: mobile accounts for roughly 70% of the device impressions in the same export (7,985 of 11,379), against about 28% on desktop and under 2% on tablet. (Source: Shalyam Search Console export, 14 Jul–16 Oct 2026, question-style queries only.) That is one reason every fact on a college page — not just the fee — needs a clear source and a short mobile-friendly answer, and it is the subject of the next post in this series.

Step 1 — Someone submits a fee with proof

On a college page, a contributor (a student, alumnus, or college staff) opens the contribution form for Fees. They enter:

• the course (for example B.Tech CSE),
• the tuition range or amount,
• hostel and other charges if the notice lists them,
• the academic year the notice applies to,
• and proof: a URL to the college’s fee page or a PDF/JPG of the fee notice.

They must tick consent confirming they are allowed to share the document and that the fact is accurate to their knowledge. They may add an email for follow-up; that email is not shown on the public page.

If they submit without proof, the row does not become “verified” in the same way—see Step 4.

Step 2 — A reviewer checks the proof (not the person)

Every submission goes into a review queue. Reviewers work from a fixed checklist, in order:

1. Is this one of the allowed fields, with a year where required?
2. Does the proof link open, or is the uploaded file readable?
3. Is the proof from the college, a government body, or an official notice—not another website’s article or a student forum?
4. Does the number in the proof match what was submitted (course, year, currency)?
5. Does the file show personal phone numbers, personal emails, or student names? If yes, it is rejected; the contributor can resubmit a redacted notice.
6. Is it a duplicate of something already live?
7. If there is no document, do two independent contributors agree on the same value? Only then can it be published as contributor-reported, not as fully verified from a notice.

Reviewers choose Approve, Reject (with a reason such as proof missing, unreadable, does not match, out of date, or duplicate), or Ask for more proof when an email was provided.

You see the message: Thanks. A reviewer will check this within 7 days. That is intentional: nothing goes on the page as verified until a human check finishes.

Step 3 — What you see on the college page

When a fee is approved, the page shows:

• the value (for example a tuition range),
• a status such as Verified with source (or Contributor-reported when there was no notice but two people agreed),
• and Last verified: with a calendar date.

That date is when the proof was last confirmed—not when someone guessed last year’s forum post.

Structured data and search snippets use only verified fields. If fees are not verified, we do not put “Fees” in the title or imply a number we have not checked.

Step 4 — How to check a fee yourself (same rules as our reviewers)

You do not need Shalyam to sanity-check a college. Use this mini-checklist:

If you find a clear notice, you can submit it on Shalyam so the next student sees the same source and date.

What Shalyam does not do

• We do not treat WhatsApp forwards, Quora answers, or another portal’s table as proof.
• We do not publish personal mobile numbers as admission contacts.
• We do not show a college page in Google’s index until it has enough verified fields (our pilot rule: three verified fields before the page is treated as indexable). Until then, the page may be deliberately withheld from search—quality before reach.

Fees and other time-sensitive fields are scheduled for re-check about 12 months after they were last verified, so stale notices can be updated.

Browse colleges on Shalyam and see what "verified" looks like in practice.