$142,000 A YEAR FOR UWI DEGREE

THE St. Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies is imposing a staggering $142,200 a year tuition fee for a bachelor’s degree.

A “full fee-paying” cohort of students will be enrolled for the Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery (BMBS) degree in September.

BMBS is a five-year course of study at the Faculty of Medical Sciences.

The students will not be eligible to access GATE, national bursaries, Government scholarships, staff waivers, or “similar funding structures,” Campus Registrar Kevin Kalloo explained in a memorandum last week.

Total tuition fees for local students will be around $750,000, making the BMBS one of the costliest bachelor’s degrees in regional academia.

The fees could have the effect of debarring poor local students who are aspiring to become medical doctors.

In recent months, UWI proposed increases in tuition fees by between 25 and 71 per cent, but the measure was put on hold.

Instead, Cabinet set up a committee to examine the campus’ financial affairs.

Regional students of BMBS will pay US $25,000 a year (about TT $168 for each academic year, a total of TT $838,000 for the five-year study).

International students are being charged US $27,000 a year (around TT $180,000 each year, for a total of TT $905,000).

The higher fees are being imposed amid a fall-off in enrolment in both under-graduate and post-graduate studies.

The campus administration has also complained about increased operating costs, including higher salaries for the academic staff.

Kalloo said a “full fee-paying” cohort is “not a new concept” to UWI.

The Faculty of Medical Sciences “plans to gradually expand this category of students in the coming years,” he said.

Critics of the fee structure fear the campus could become an elitist institution, out of the reach of students from lower-income families.

“The campus may soon be affordable only to the privileged,” said one university source who is upset with the high fees.

In June 2022, Finance Minister Colm Imbert said the Government was cutting its annual $500 million a year subvention to UWI by 10 per cent.

“We are faced with a challenge with the St. Augustine campus continuing to ask us for large sums of money,” Imbert said.

UWI officials baulked at the reduced funding.

Government officials have called on UWI to slash some of its less popular courses from the 300 on its prospectus.

The university source urged UWI’s administration to improve efficiency, including increased use of modern technology, to utilise the unused Debe campus, and to diversify into other areas of academia.

He urged UWI to make its course schedule “more relevant” and the campus generally “more competitive, with a higher level of international acceptance.”

In her most recent principal’s report, Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine said that “in order to better facilitate our revenue revolution goals” a Campus Implementation Committee is examining “potentially profitable projects.”

Students for the “full fee-paying programme will be accepted up to July 31.

The cohort “will be on the same track as the usual September intake,” Kalloo stated.