BARBADIAN?APPLICANTS?TO?the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies are down dramatically and the Students’ Guild president fears some academic disciplines could disappear when the new year starts in September.
The dire prediction has come from the students’ body head Damani Parris, who said there had been a 33 per cent across-the-board drop in applications to the university when compared to the previous academic year.
And Parris linked the situation directly to Government’s decision to make students pay their tuition fees from the start of the academic year in September. Those annual fees range from $7 000 to $18 000, depending on the faculty.
Parris revealed figures which showed a decrease of 179 applications in the Faculty of Humanities, down 48.1 per cent; a reduction of 164 applications in the Law Faculty or 26.9 per cent; a fall of 85 applications to the Medical Sciences Faculty or 16.8 per cent; a 106-application reduction in Science and Technology or 18.1 per cent and, in the largest faculty – Social Sciences – there was a dramatic fall of 783 applications, representing a whopping 41.6 per cent decline.
These figures, he said, did not include continuing students, for which no data was available.
