There is growing disquiet among continuing students of the University of Ghana over the rise in their fees for the 2017/2018 academic year.
Each year, the university increases fees based on prevailing inflation rate plus 2%.
But some of the students who have been speaking to Citi News say the current fees are expensive and are appealing for a reduction.
One of them noted that students offering distance education courses will go through unbearable hardship following the increases.
“Even in distance education, last semester they paid GH¢2,499; the new academic calendar their fees is GHc2800. That is a GH¢300 difference…we cannot pay it.”
Another student also said taking the current inflation rate in consideration, the fees should have decreased instead.
“Maybe when you increased it last year, we might say it makes sense because, in 2015/2016, we saw a rising inflation, but then from 2016/2017, we are looking at the inflation figure falling so what’s the basis for the increase.? Even if you want to increase the fees it should be something marginal, something which could be so insignificant, but here is the case that the increase is getting too close to GH¢200. With the hall fees, that one has also seen an increase…it just doesn’t make sense,” he added.
The President of the Students Representative Council, Daniel Oteng, has also described the increase as an unacceptable.
According to him, it breaches an earlier agreement reached between management and the SRC.
“There was an agreement when we went to finance and general support meeting, the agreement was that the fees were going to be increased by 13.2 percent because there was no council to approve or disprove it. But to our surprise, some other colleges came out and we realised that the increase was beyond the 13.2 percent. And for us, we think that is very unfair to the student body…so we’ve been communicating with the school administration to have the anomaly rectified.
