– students on mission to push gov’t to remove tuition fees

By Vishani Ragobeer

DEVTA Ramroop is a final year biology student at the University of Guyana (UG). During the day, she attends her classes at school but during her spare time, she does a part-time job to make ends meet.

She does this to support her mother, a market vendor, who works every day of the week to maintain the household and to send Devta and her sister to UG.

Ramroop is also the incumbent President of the University of Guyana Student Society (UGSS) which represents some 7,000 students across two distant campuses.

“Free UG is still something I would want because I hope to pursue my master’s degree at UG,” she explained. “It would mean that I wouldn’t have to pause my education [after completing her Bachelor’s Degree in Biology] to work and save tuition [for the Master’s Degree].”

She also indicated that if the university was free, she would be able to invest her money into other areas of her life that may need improvement (like transportation or housing).

“That is what I call youth development,” she said.

Recently, an informal group of young people have banded together into what is called the “Free University of Guyana Movement”.

“What the group is trying to do is basically bring UG into compliance with the Constitution,” a member of the movement and advocate for ‘Free UG’, Elson Lowe related.

Article 27 of the Constitution of Guyana states: “Every citizen has the right to a free education from nursery to university as well as at non-formal places where opportunities are provided for education and training.”

This article falls in Chapter II, which connotes the principles and basis of the political, economic and social system. Also detailed in this section is every person’s right to sovereignty, the right to own personal property, the right to free health and social care, inter alia. Guyana, under the People’s National Congress (PNC) Government, offered free education from nursery to university.

According to statistics provided by the Bureau of Statistics, only 2.3 per cent of Guyana’s population has a bachelor’s degree. For developed countries, that figure stands at about 30 per cent. That means, as explained by Lowe, that Guyana is more than 10 times behind where it needs to be.

“I think this is particularly relevant in our aims to diversify our economy and I think unless we get our numbers of people who have degrees sharply, I think we will struggle to diversify the economy because we don’t have the skills to do so,” he highlighted.

Lowe, who has a background in economics, opined: “It seems to me that the only way we can fill an increase or sharp increase in requirements for the oil and gas sector is through importation of individuals who have those requirements and those skills.”

“What is required right now is a substantial and strategic shift so that we don’t have long-term structural inequality – and one of the ways in doing that is making UG free and incentivising people to apply and remain in the university,” he said further.

For UG’s most recent valedictorian, Shakti Persaud, free university is good in theory, but she questioned how sustainable this could be.

BETTER FACILITIES NEEDED

“We want better facilities – air conditioning, infrastructure, etc, and I don’t see these things happening unless the university makes money,” Shakti related.

Yearly, UG receives a subvention from Central Government to augment the services it provides. In the 2019 National Budget, $3.1 billion was allocated for the university.

Making the university free, however, would incur the government a greater cost. Lowe however suggested that the incoming revenues from oil and gas can be used to make the university free.

In February 2019, it was reported that the oil and natural gas industry contributed more than US$2.2 billion to the general fund of New Mexico (an oil-producing state in the US) for the fiscal year 2018.

And according to a report released by the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association (NMOGA), more than half of the industry’s generated revenue supported K-12 public schools and higher-education institutions across the state.

Free public education at the tertiary level is not a new concept.

In fact, according to Germany’s public international broadcaster, Deutsche Welle, “…in France, students only have to pay a matriculation fee; Austria only collects fees from non-European Union (EU) foreign students, and in the Czech Republic, only those who want to study in English have to pay. In Norway and Denmark, tuition is free for citizens, as well as students from EU countries.”

In Germany, the news agency reported that higher education is free, except for semester fees that cover administrative costs. And in some states, only long-term students have to pay an extra fee.

“Public education is a worthy investment for state government, with immense social and economic benefits… Investing in public education is thus far more cost-effective for the state than paying for the social and economic consequences of under-funded, low quality schools,” Associate Professor of Education at the Pennsylvania State University, Dana Mitra, PhD wrote in a 2011 study.

The government of Guyana has fostered the establishment of a Natural Resources Fund (NRF), which will cater for funds from oil production in 2020.

“Until we can reap the benefits [from the oil and gas industry] – as in actually see it benefiting each and every person, household and student – then we can consider free tertiary education,” Shakti said. “I don’t see a problem in using oil revenues to fund tertiary education, but all citizens should benefit from that [money] first.”

SUPPORT

Speaking to this publication, Minister of Education, Dr. Nicolette Henry indicated that she is aware of the movement of young people advocating for the government to make UG free.

She, however, underscored that she could not share whether the government is considering to support this move or not, since it is something that has not been discussed at the level of Cabinet.

“I’m listening at this point in time [and] I’m doing my own research,” she indicated.

However, Lowe indicated that the group is hoping to conduct extensive polls to solicit the views of citizens on making the university free.

“To that end, we are conducting extensive polling relating to the University of Guyana being free and we intend to get to 20,000 people,” he shared.

“We’ll be conducting polling manually for up to 5000 people and the additional 15,000 polls will rely more on the online medium,” Lowe said, while explaining that “the average Guyanese” is being questioned through these polls.

And the reason why the group is conducting the first 5000 manually is so that they can mitigate any criticism about the data being falsified, according to Lowe. “The support for Article 27 remains strong in Guyana and that is something we want to make clear in Guyana,” he said.

“Of course [free university education] is a commitment because it is in the Constitution, but if we do not believe that it should be in the Constitution, or we do not agree with that – which I find to be a perfectly valid position – the appropriate action to take is for there to be a referendum or some parliamentary action to amend the Constitution,” Lowe shared. “It’s either you want free university or you want a referendum – there’s no such thing, as per Article 27 of the Constitution, that you can have paid university education.”