The Ghana Institute of Journalism (GIJ) has asked students of the institution to defer their courses for paying school fees late.
This directive is on the back of the school’s pending end of first semester examination which is scheduled to take place from March 29, 2021, to April 19, 2021.
In a press statement issued, the school’s authority ordered the affected students to comply and act accordingly.
“Management of the Ghana Institute of Journalism, at its meeting held on Monday, March 22, 2021, decided that students who paid their fees after the registration deadline should defer their programme,” the notice reads.
Per the new fee schedule, regular students pursuing the Institute’s Bachelor in Communication Studies programme pay GH¢2,520.00 whilst those pursuing a Diploma in Communication Studies (Regular and Weekend) will have to pay GH¢2,310.00 as academic fees.
For level 300 Top-up fresh students (Weekend), their new academic fee is now GH¢3,100 whereas their colleagues in level 400 will have to pay GH¢2,730.00
The fee for first-year Diploma in Communication Studies (evening) students is now GH¢2,660.00 whilst their colleagues in the weekend class will pay GH¢2,900.00.
However, the angry students have strongly opposed the directive from the school’s authority stating that initial penalty for late payment was scrapped without effective communication to the student body.
“I think this action by the management is a callous one. I think it is inhuman, and I think management has not been fair to students. These students in question have actually paid the fees they were required to, whether it is 60% or 100%. The only crime these students did is to be poor. Their only crime is the fact that they could not meet the deadline [for payment of fees] as proposed by the school. How can you punish a student who wants to change his destiny and that of his family?”
A student said “For crying out loud, we live in the era of COVID-19 and businesses and livelihoods of people have been affected. Students who did not have the means to pay on time were out there seeking for support, working themselves out to pay fees that have been increased. An increase we pleaded with authorities to take away because it is burdensome. So if such a student was even late in paying the fees, the best thing was to block the system so that they will not even pay the fees in the first place so they know their fate before hand. So why wait for students to make payments and then four days to examination, you send a communiqué that they should defer their programme for a year? Some of these students are in level 400 and have about five months to complete the school, why do you want to alter their future because of late payment of fees?”