The Barbados Community College (BCC) has introduced a payment plan for students for the first time.
Campus registrar Sydney Arthur said they had to make the move in response to students who were querying whether they could pay their fees in instalments.
“We’ve always tried to accommodate the student who is in difficulty, but this time around there are quite a number of persons who [need assistance]. And this applies especially to the part-time students who have to pay $750 tuition for the evening,” he said.
Arthur added there had been no “significant” decrease or increase in applications for their programmes, despite the drastically reduced numbers at the University of the West Indies (UWI). He said the trend came as no surprise to him because while UWI students had to pay a lot more, BCC students could incur significant costs as well.
Arthur said a full-time student had to pay $320 to register for the first year, and then had to purchase books, which ran upwards of $100 for one. The cost was pushed up by transportation and food, he explained.
