Rising tuition fees highlight flawed university finances

The rising cost of a university education in Jordan is shutting out low-income students and revealing long-term structural problems with the financing of higher education, writes Mohammad Fraij for Al-Fanar Media.

Efforts by Jordanian universities to make up for shrinking government funding through private investments and ‘parallel programmes’ that charge some students higher fees have not been enough to prevent them from increasing tuition.

Administrators say they are burdened with many faculty and staff members who, as civil servants, are difficult to fire, and they have no place to turn except tuition to raise the funds they need to support academic programmes. But some students say they are being sacrificed to the universities’ need for money.
Full report on the Al-Fanar Media site