Local News
Report: Universities initiate talks on 2018 fee increases─── 07:43 Sun, 08 Oct 2017
Johannesburg - At least three universities have reportedly embarked on holding discussions about 2018 tertiary fee increases, while President Zuma studies the Heher commission report on the feasibility of free higher education.
City Press reports it's been a month since Zuma promised to study its recommendations and make it public.
Meanwhile, North-West University (NWU), along with the Free State’s Central University of Technology (CUT) and the Western Cape’s Stellenbosch University (SU), have quietly initiated talks with student bodies and interest groups seeking to find common ground for their “preliminary” budgets and to come up with an amicable solution to what appears to be a stalemate between the expectations of the #FeesMustFall student movement, the presidency and tertiary institutions.
The three institutions told City Press this week that they had taken the initiative to discuss possible fee increases rather than wait until it was too late.
Director of the Centre for Higher Education Trust, Dr Nico Cloete, said universities had no choice but to come up with proposed budgets for next year.
He said last-minute announcements on fee increases often destabilised universities’ planning systems – as had been the case at South Africa’s tertiary institutions for the past three years.
This also negatively affected students, he said.
