The St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus of The Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies has said that Chan­cel­lor Robert Bermudez has ap­proved a re­quest from the cam­pus to re­tain cur­rent tu­ition fees for the up­com­ing aca­d­e­m­ic year.

The re­quest was made con­se­quent to feed­back from prospec­tive and cur­rent stu­dents of the dif­fi­cul­ty in com­mit­ting to reg­is­ter­ing for the new year giv­en the un­cer­tain­ty about the new fee lev­els.

Prin­ci­pal Bri­an Copeland re­it­er­at­ed that, as the cam­pus looks for­ward to wel­com­ing new and re­turn­ing stu­dents in Sep­tem­ber, fac­ul­ty and staff re­main com­mit­ted to serv­ing stu­dents and the broad­er so­ci­ety to the best of their abil­i­ty, and in keep­ing with its sta­tus of a glob­al­ly rec­og­nized, world-class high­er ed­u­ca­tion in­sti­tu­tion.

He al­so com­ment­ed that cit­i­zens who ques­tion the val­ue of a uni­ver­si­ty de­gree in the cur­rent eco­nom­ic cli­mate should come to terms with the fact that a Uni­ver­si­ty ed­u­ca­tion is a life­long in­vest­ment.

"The em­pha­sis right now should be on prepar­ing one­self for the fu­ture when the eco­nom­ic chal­lenges have sig­nif­i­cant­ly im­proved - those who are pre­pared for that cer­tain­ty will be best able to seize what­ev­er op­por­tu­ni­ties may arise. In that re­gard, join­ing the UWI St Au­gus­tine fam­i­ly rep­re­sents the best val­ue for mon­ey, giv­en the fact that its fees are among the low­est and that its de­grees are ac­cept­ed and rec­og­nized glob­al­ly," a state­ment from UWI said.

Af­ter more than two years of re­mote teach­ing and learn­ing, the St Au­gus­tine Cam­pus will re­turn to face-to-face op­er­a­tions from Sep­tem­ber 2022, in time for the start of the 2022/2023 aca­d­e­m­ic year.

The ad­min­is­tra­tive staff re­turned to phys­i­cal work in June and the aim is to have the stu­dents on cam­pus in the new aca­d­e­m­ic year.

The cam­pus' se­nior man­age­ment team is en­sur­ing that phys­i­cal spaces, such as au­di­to­ria, lec­ture rooms and lab­o­ra­to­ries are pre­pared. Con­ces­sion­aires will be re­turn­ing while main­tain­ing safe­ty pro­to­cols for the cam­pus com­mu­ni­ty.

Stu­dents will have full ac­cess to con­duct labs, vis­it the Al­ma Jor­dan Li­brary and con­sult with lec­tur­ers. Halls of Res­i­dence will re­sume op­er­a­tions and will wel­come stu­dents to the Joyce Gib­son- In­niss Hall (Med­ical Sci­ences stu­dents), Sir Arthur Lewis and Cana­da Halls.