Apenisa Waqairadovu 
The Fiji Higher Education Commission has today expressed its desire to reduce tuition fees at local tertiary institutions.
Chair Steve Chand revealed this during a bilateral meeting with United Arab Emirates Envoy to the Pacific, Omar Shehadeh.
When asked about the issue, Chand says the government is already awarding students scholarships for local institutions, but tuition fees remain high.
Chand states the current situation benefits tertiary institutions immensely due to government-funded scholarships.
“That’s really the idea of the current government; we want to bring the costs down at universities. For me personally, I always look at it as a triple-deepening segment: they get our funding, the students are still getting scholarships, and then the fees are still high.”
UAE Envoy to the Pacific Omar Shehadeh says the UAE is willing to provide advice on the issue, as they have enforced similar standards with their own universities.
“The way we work it out is if a university wants to receive a scholarship, they need to abide by certain rules. If they do not want to abide by certain rules, you send the students to another university, and then they start losing because, at the end of the day, it’s an institution, but they are also looking for some profit, which is fair enough because they need to keep renovating and pushing the boundaries higher.”
Meanwhile, Chand says that Fiji is bracing for a surge in regional students coming to Fiji in the coming years, as New Zealand has indicated it is going to follow in Australia’s footsteps by capping its student intake.
