Bavi­ta Gopaulchan

As of­fi­cials of the UWI St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus search for ways to re­gain fi­nan­cial vi­abli­ty, the West In­dies Group of Uni­ver­si­ty Teach­ers (WIGUT) has asked them not to in­crease stu­dent fees.

The call was made af­ter cam­pus prin­ci­pal Prof Rose-Marie Belle An­toine re­vealed on Tues­day that there has been a steady de­cline in the uni­ver­si­ty’s rev­enue due to re­duced en­rol­ment and low­er gov­ern­ment sub­ven­tions in 2021 and 2022.

The cam­pus prin­ci­pal did not ac­tu­al­ly say whether stu­dent fees would be ad­just­ed to help im­prove rev­enue but WIGUT pres­i­dent,Dr In­di­ra Ram­per­sad warned that do­ing so would fur­ther hurt the in­sti­tu­tion.

“We can­not de­pend whol­ly on stu­dent fees. Our stu­dents them­selves were strug­gling even be­fore COVID and post-COVID. It is ag­gra­vat­ed be­cause their par­ents, many of them, are out of jobs,” Dr Ram­per­sad said.

Last year, the cam­pus re­ceived just over $82 mil­lion in gov­ern­ment sub­ven­tion com­pared to the just over $100 mil­lion in 2021.

Dr Ram­per­sad said there have been cuts in sub­ven­tion over the last five years. Em­pha­sis­ing that UWI is an ed­u­ca­tion fa­cil­i­ty, not a prof­it-gen­er­at­ing en­ti­ty, she said the 44 per cent cut to the open cam­pus and the 40 per cent de­crease to the Uni­ver­si­ty Cen­tre are af­fect­ing op­er­a­tions.

She said $50 mil­lion is owed to the UWI by gov­ern­ments across the re­gion and the Vice Chan­cel­lor has been at­tempt­ing to mit­i­gate the loss­es by seek­ing as­sis­tance from in­ter­na­tion­al stake­hold­ers.

Tthe UWI St Au­gus­tine Guild of Stu­dents said stu­dents have been feel­ing the im­pact of the cam­pus’ re­duc­tion in staff through “the lax up­keep of cam­pus fa­cil­i­ties and its in­fra­struc­ture that dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fect our mem­bers, across the UWI STA cam­pus­es”.

Act­ing Guild pres­i­dent, Kyle Bis­nath said: “As it re­lates to con­cerns of de­clin­ing ad­mis­sions, we adopt the phi­los­o­phy of the UWI’s Triple A strat­e­gy, where we wish to max­imise ac­cess to high­er ed­u­ca­tion and, recog­nise that many stu­dents now choose the op­por­tu­ni­ty to be em­ployed af­ter sec­ondary ed­u­ca­tion rather than pur­su­ing ter­tiary. We there­fore urge UWI to con­tin­ue to en­dorse en­tre­pre­neur­ship as an av­enue af­ter grad­u­a­tion rather than re­ly sole­ly on em­ploy­ment.”

Bis­nath said the Guild will con­tin­ue to ad­vo­cate for hyflex learn­ing to help re­duce op­er­a­tional costs for the cam­pus.