An­na-Lisa Paul

As the na­tion con­tin­ues to reel un­der the so­cio-eco­nom­ic pres­sures re­sult­ing from COVID-19, stu­dent reg­is­tra­tion fees at the Uni­ver­si­ty of T&T (UTT) have been in­creased by 300 per cent ahead of the new aca­d­e­m­ic year in Sep­tem­ber.

An­gry stu­dents yes­ter­day com­plained this would mean the end of the line for many of them, as their fam­i­lies are strug­gling to sur­vive on re­duced in­comes and in some cas­es, over­come re­trench­ment.

Con­firm­ing the fees had jumped sig­nif­i­cant­ly from $440 to $1,200 last evening, UTT chair, Pro­fes­sor Clement Im­bert, said they are will­ing to com­pro­mise and work with the stu­dent body to set up pay­ment op­tions that would not be a bur­den on their al­ready-stretched pock­ets.

“It is a huge in­crease per­cent­age-wise, but it is not a large amount of mon­ey in ab­solute terms,” Im­bert said.

The last time UTT in­creased this fee was 12 years ago.

Im­bert in­di­cat­ed that the uni­ver­si­ty had in­curred a lot of un­ex­pect­ed ex­pens­es, fol­low­ing the clo­sure of all ed­u­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions back in March 2020, as part of the move to set up an on­line plat­form for both stu­dents and lec­tur­ers.

UTT chairman Prof Clement Imbert

Abraham-Diaz

“Our li­cense fees have gone up tremen­dous­ly,” Im­bert said.

“We have had to ex­pend plen­ty more mon­ey in terms of sup­port for on­line teach­ing and that has cost us a lot of mon­ey in pay­ing for the li­cense fees, which al­lowed us to set up the tech­nol­o­gy plat­form and se­cure oth­er sup­port for them on­line,” he said.

He added: “It is not a prob­lem for us to work out a pay­ment op­tion or ex­tend pay­ment dead­lines spread over a pe­ri­od of time so it would not be as bur­den­some on the stu­dents who want to con­tin­ue their ed­u­ca­tion.”

When Guardian Me­dia reached out to some of the ag­griev­ed stu­dents, they de­ferred com­ment­ing un­til to­day, as a meet­ing has been sched­uled with a team of of­fi­cials from UTT and the Stu­dents’ Guild for 9 am.

The stu­dents had ac­cused the uni­ver­si­ty of un­fair­ly im­pos­ing a hike in fees mere weeks from the reg­is­tra­tion pe­ri­od for the up­com­ing 2021/2022 aca­d­e­m­ic year.

They ar­gued that dur­ing the pan­dem­ic, they had not been ac­cess­ing any of the uni­ver­si­ty’s re­sources and they la­belled the in­crease un­rea­son­able.