The Member of Parliament for Ningo-Prampram constituency, Sam George has charged heads of tertiary institutions, as well as the Minister of Education in charge of Tertiary Education, to stop burdening parents and students with exorbitant form fees.
In an interview with Ghanaweb, Mr. George said that there are instances whereby applicants buy forms for two or more tertiary institutions and they are mandated to pay for each form they buy. He lamented that this was somewhat a burden to such students and their parents.
“We cannot be burdening the Ghanaian parent so much in terms of cost of forms. I mean, in the Western world, the forms are free. So we should get to that point with our university education. You have a student who buys a form to go to Tech, to Legon, to UCC, to UEW, to UMAT. He buys five forms and for each of these forms, he pays the same fees”, he said.
Mr. George added that the Public Accounts Committee made some suggestions to the Ministry of Education to consider other flexible alternatives which would ease the financial strain on parents and students, after interacting with the Minister of State in charge of Tertiary Education, Professor Kwesi Yankah.
“We made a suggestion that the universities and even the security services should begin to look at a system where they give out the forms for free. And when you gain admission, as part of your registration procedure, the administrative cost of processing your admission will be embedded in there”, he posited.
“A second option to look at will be to have a system where you still sell the forms at GHC 200. But if you do not gain admission, the administrative cost of GHC 100 is deducted and a refund of GHC 100 is made to the Ghanaian who applied for the admission and did not get it”, he added.
Mr. George suggested that a centralized joint university admissions system is set up so that applicants can pay just one processing fee.
This, he believed, would be of greater good to the Ghanaian citizen since he or she would pay less fees.
