SURPRISE, surprise. It is actually cheaper to earn a degree by enrolling at the Open Learning Institute (OLI), which receives no recurrent grants from the Government, than at the universities, which are heavily subsidised to the tune of billions every year.
Projections by the OLI show the 1995/96 tuition fees for a student taking 40 credits - the equivalent of one year of full-time study by conventional means - amount to $92,000, compared with $92,250 a year charged by universities funded through the University Grants Committee (UGC).
However, while the fees paid by university students represent just a fraction of the universities' total expenditure, fees paid by OLI students cover all the direct and indirect recurrent costs of the institute, ranging from the salary of the director to the wages of caretakers.
While needy university students are given grants and loans to finance their study, OLI students have no access to grants, and a loan scheme being set up with a $50 million endowment is expected to benefit only a few hundred students a year.
Why should a working adult who missed the opportunity of higher education be required to pay the full cost of earning a degree at the OLI simply because he or she has a job? Shouldn't adults have a right to receive a higher education and shouldn't the Government help late developers to realise their ambition by subsidising the OLI? Interestingly, these questions have never been widely debated, not even by the Education Commission when it recommended the establishment of the OLI in its second report in 1986.
'The long-term objective should be that the [OLI] programme should be so far as possible self-financing, ie, that students should meet the direct costs of the courses which they took,' the commission said, without giving any justifications.