NDC gives SHS graduates free university academic fees policy cost
The National Democratic Congress (NDC) says the free university academic fees policy to be introduced if it comes into power in 2025 after winning the 2024 general election slated for December 7, 2024, will cost GH¢300 million a year.
The main opposition National Democratic Congress during its youth manifesto launch in Accra on Monday, August 12, 2024, promised the free university academic fees policy to support brilliant but needy WASSCE graduates.
“We have students who cannot attend public basic schools, yet we have empty private senior high schools. If we can educate them at the same cost as in public schools, let’s move them there and pay the same amount,” he proposed.
I want you all to stay with me. No fees stress. No fees stress. What are we saying? President John Mahama is simply promising that for all university entrants into level 100, you are not pay academic fees
No academic fees for all level 100 students. We’ve had many stories about students who finished school with six As, seven As, eight As and we have to start crowdfunding sources for them so they can enter into university. All of that would be a thing of the past in the next NDC administration,” a member of the NDC Youth manifesto team said.
Speaking in an interview, an NDC Manifesto Committee on Education member, Dr Clement Apaak said the initiative aims to address the gap between the number of WASSCE graduates and those who advance to tertiary education often due to financial constraints.
“One of the challenges students face is their ability to pay fees and it has recently become obvious that the number of students who write WASSCE and proceed to the university is not encouraging and this is because the money to pay fees is a problem.
When we engaged with youth groups on how to resolve this, waiving off fees for first-year students came up strongly
From the figures that we have, if we are to go by some information that has been put out by our good brother Kofi Asare of Africa Education Watch, they estimate that if one was to look at the number of students who took up places in tertiary institutions in the 2023/2024 academic year, they are less than 200,000 and when you look at the academic fees of first-year students on average, it works out to anywhere between GH¢2,000 and GH¢2,300 thereabout
“So if we were to use that as a base, we could posit that the policy will cost less than GH¢300 million a year and of course, student numbers fluctuate each year, so it is doable and if we were to pluck revenue loopholes, we should be able to mobilise the resources to fund this proposal,” Apaak said in an interview on the Citi Breakfast Show on Citi FM
