Students to miss out in graduation ceremony

 

SOME 200 students or more could miss out graduating from the Solomon Islands National University later this week because members of Parliament (MPs) have not honoured their sponsorship commitments in paying up outstanding fees.

Outstanding fees range from $2,000 to $10,000 per student.

Some of the fees have been outstanding since 2016.

The fees were to be paid out of the Constituency Scholarship Fund, which MPs received last year.

Each Constituency received $300,000 from the $15 million Constituency Scholarship Fund in 2016.

This year the Government increased the Constituency Scholarship Fund by $2.5 million to $17.5 million.

This means each Constituency receives $350,000 in Constituency scholarship funding.

On the basis of this budgetary provision, some MPs simply wrote to SINU last year requesting admission for students from their Constituencies.

But, payments were slow in coming, some never came.

Earlier this year MPs again tried to readmit students from their Constituencies, but those with outstanding arrears were denied entry.

The SINU Administration has been lenient with students, allowing them to complete their studies, but it has now decided against graduating the students until their arrears were cleared hopefully by the offending MPs.

According to one distraught father, one MP owes SINU about $500,000 in unpaid tuition and other fees, which have been accumulating since 2016.

This is for all the students from the MP’s constituency.

Late yesterday afternoon the MP stepped in to settle some of the outstanding fees he had incurred in unpaid fees on behalf of students from his constituency.

“I am pleased to say the MP has now paid the outstanding fees for my two sons. He has honoured his commitment to do so,” the father said last night.

The parent said he is not sure whether all the debts have been cleared.

“The graduation ceremony could be a shattered dream for many students,” the father said.