Students who have received funding under the Government Assistance for Tuition Expenses (Gate) programme and failed to complete their course of study may soon be tracked down and asked to repay those monies.
This was the word from the director of the Ministry of Education’s Funding and Grants Administration Department, Teresa Davidson, yesterday, as she noted they had received approval from Cabinet for increased financial and human resources to be invested in order to restructure and improve the department’s operations.
Speaking at a press conference at the ministry’s St Clair head office, Davidson said: “Going forward in terms of trying to recover money, we will have to look at ways to verify the students in the database and their status.”
She said the drive could soon become a reality, noting that previously they were hampered by staffing problems. The increase in staffing, she said, would now allow them to investigate cases of students who had failed to meet their Gate contractual obligations by passing courses and initiate the fund recovery process.
Davidson said with the proposed changes, “we can put someone to work on it in terms of setting procedures on how that recovery can be done.
“Within our database, we may have paid for three years for a student attending UWI but because we may not have collected data that this person has graduated, we are not sure.”
Davidson pointed out that if students did not meet performance standards, they were required to refund the money for the programme. “We have been collecting money from students over the years,” she explained.
She estimated that upwards of $70 million had so far been collected since 2006 and that the amounts collected had increased yearly, with close to $14 million collected last year. She said students continued to visit the department on a daily basis to repay monies.
But she added: “That’s one of the problems that we have to monitor right now. We can only monitor the students who come back seeking Gate. If you come back and try to access Gate for another programme, then we will not fund you if you cannot show proof that you have successfully completed the previous programme.”
“If, however, the students drop out of their programmes and are no longer in the system, they have no immediate way of tracking them and will now have to research the individual cases.”
Noting that funding was provided to both public and private institutions, Davidson said the latter were subjected to audits to ensure students met the stipulated requirements.
“If we find there are students who did not meet the requirements, the institution is billed and asked to refund monies spent,” Davidson said. She said prior to the current restructuring processes “Gate was very, very open.” She said one only needed proof of T&T nationality as there was no age limit.
But going forward she assured that students would not be allowed to abuse the programme, including pursuing more than one course through Gate. “At this point in time, students cannot be in more than one programme,” she added
On another issue, Davidson said the question of obligatory service for successful students who accessed Gate was also something which was still being worked out.
Education Minister Anthony Garcia also provided a list of areas in which Government had made significant financial contributions to education over the last five years.
These include:
Infrastructure: $2.7 billion.
Recurrent expenditure: $10.5 billion.
Gate: $3.2 billion.
HELP loans: $101,836 million.
Scholarships: $912 million.
Law student owing
One student, who yesterday admitted to still being financially beholden to the Gate programme, was a first-time law student.
The 35-year-old woman successfully completed a two-year certificate programme at the UWI Open Campus more than five years ago, following which she was granted funding to pursue a Diploma in Law.
After failing two exams, the woman was told that she would have to pay $5,000 to re-write the two exams before she was allowed to continue on in the programme.
Additionally, she was advised if she was to pursue another course of study she would have to repay the outstanding sum to the Government before being allowed to apply for funding for other programmes.
The woman, who did not want to be identified, admitted she was one of the “bad pay” students who had failed to honour the requirement to repay the monies.