PAY THE COST

Tue, 12/06/2016 - 12:00am
By: 
Patricia Thangaraj

 

 
Every student who qualifies for university education should pay for tuition fees.
 
This was the strong view expressed by Educator and former Principal of the Coleridge and Parry Secondary School, Senator Alwin Adams, who authored a chapter entitled ‘Fifty Years of Education in Barbados. Funding Tertiary Education: Student Tuition Fees Technical/Vocational Education and National Economic Development and the Struggle for Parity of Esteem’. The chapter was a part of the book entitled ‘Barbados: Fifty Years of Independence’, which was launched at the Barbados Museum and Historical Society (BMHS) on Sunday evening.
 
“I just want to mention, in my opinion, students ought to pay school fees. Up to now it has been that the case has not yet been [made] – the fees have been charged – but the case has not yet [been] made for the payment of the fees. There are two things, one is the dated principle of the charging of tuition fees and I want to say to you all ... having charged the fees, every student who qualifies should be guaranteed admission to university.”
 
He stated that not only should students who want to enter university pay for their tuition, but the payment of these fees should actually lead to a rise in student enrolment figures and that the university in general should be better off as a result of the payment of these tuition fees.
 

“Technically, student numbers should not dramatically drop. In fact, they should remain the same and even go up...Priority should be given to areas that immediately facilitate economic growth and development; that the Government should be relieved of some - not all - but some of the expenses...and that the university should not be less well off after the introduction of the fees. The university should be better off actually after the introduction of the fees so that it would be able to carry out its mandate to educate our young people so that they can compete with the” persons in the metropolitan nations and elsewhere in the world.

 

The Educator stated that one of the reasons why he purports to the viewpoint that students should pay their own way is because they certainly reap the benefits from having a university education after they have graduated in terms of such areas as their salary scale as he referred to statistics that he said was taken from research coming out of England.

 

“Graduates generally receive more prestigious and higher paying jobs than non-graduates. Graduates also receive higher pay as a lifetime earning than non-graduates. Indeed, research shows that in the UK, graduates earn an average of over one hundred thousand pounds more than non-graduates over their lifetime.”

 

Furthermore, when the system whereby the Government funded university education entirely out of its own pockets was feasible at the time that it was introduced because of the low student numbers, that number to date has risen significantly and as a result, this funding model is no longer sustainable.

 

“Certainly the present system - the one that we have for the funding of the education system... is unsustainable. In other words, the ability of the taxpayers to foot the bill can no longer be done because when the university started in 1963, there were probably less than 50 students and when the fees were introduced, the numbers of students were close to 9 000, now 10 000.”

 

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