Terrelonge wants UWI to discontinue quoting tuition fees in US dollar

Minister of State in the Ministry of Education, Alando Terrelonge, has joined calls for the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) to stop quoting tuition fees for some faculties in US dollars.

The faculties of engineering, law, medicine, and nursing quote their fees in US dollars and students have complained about the significant increase in fees for the 2020/21 academic year.

Some students will have to pay as much as $128,000 extra for tuition.

READ: UWI students may have to skip year as tuition costs jump

Terrelonge says he understands the sentiments that have argued that the UWI should be reducing fees in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has hampered students’ ability to earn US dollars due to cancelled overseas summer-work programmes.

“As a major seat of learning, UWI should make sure they’re on the right side of the issues that will define the debates and write the history of the post-COVID era. They need to make sure that they do not become willing partners to the disenfranchisement of our students, robbing them of their education, by adopting financial regimes that only benefit the privileged. I would like to believe that those days are part of a past that UWI is not trying to resurrect. A greater balance must be achieved between tertiary institutions as "business operators" and, tertiary institutions as repositories of higher learning and ultimate empowerment of our youth and nation,” Terrelonge said in a statement.

“While I understand the need and rationale of the university to set their fees against the backing of a so-called international currency, to account for fluctuations in our own Jamaican dollar, as well as to standardise fees for international students, I am confused as to why the fees cannot be set in local currency and still achieve the same effect,” he continued.

Terrelonge further adds that the emerging and accepted common practice among businesses to quote and advertise prices in US dollars only should be done away with, as this lays the foundation to the slippery slope of complete erasure of the Jamaican currency.

“We cannot, as a nation, afford the cultural perception that our currency is irrelevant. Local businesses trade in Jamaican currency and have always made allowances for fluctuations in currency trading rates; why UWI cannot do that is a mystery.”

The education state minister is calling for the practice to stop and for fees to be adjusted to reflect the conditions imposed by the coronavirus pandemic.

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