KNUST: Hundreds of students face deferment over non-payment of fees
Some students of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) fear they may be compelled to defer their courses of study over their inability to pay their fees.
The university, in an earlier release, warned that students who fail to pay at least 70% of their fees by last Thursday will be automatically deferred.
As the students settle down to their examinations beginning tomorrow, Monday 11th April, the Student Representative Council says it has received over 300 complaints from students potentially affected by the directive.
While the student leadership says it is working to secure some concession from the University, the school’s University Relations Officer, Dr. Daniel Norris Bekoe said the deferment directive is part of the university’s age-old policies that require that students pay at least 70 percent of their fees before taking any examination.
He said the school has already given enough room for the students to pay the fees, and so it expects that all students should have paid their fees by now.
“At the beginning of every semester, all students are supposed to register their courses and pay 70 percent of their fees. We have given a very long grace period for students to do this. Technically we reopened in January and later on, there was the UTAG strike, so we had to restructure the semester beginning on the 24th of February. We are now in April, and we are preparing for mid-semester examination and the policy is that if you do not register your courses, you are not a student so if we have run the semester from February to April, and you have not registered as a student it means that you are not prepared to register,” he said.
