“We had wanted to introduce a 50% tuition increment,”- says Muk Vice Chancellor

Makerere University management yesterday insisted it will not scrap the 10 per cent tuition increment policy for new students even after they held a strike protesting the new intervention, The Daily Monitor has revealed.

Under the new arrangement, all new students entering the university shall be expected to incur the 10 per cent increment until the Shs12 million unit cost target per science student and Shs6 million for those offering humanities is reached.

The Vice Chancellor, Prof John Ssentamu Ddumba, while appearing before the Parliamentary Education committee to defend the university’s budget said they had wanted to introduce a 50 per cent increment to catch up with the inflation but relaxed the fees to 10 per cent to avoid strikes.

“Each medicine student should be paying Shs12 million but we are charging only Shs4 million annually,” Dr Ddumba said adding that “Inflation keeps rising. The unit cost for humanities is supposed to be Shs6 millon per student but we still charge as less as Shs600,000 for some courses,” he said.