BY PEARLVIS ATSU KUADEY, A VIDEO JOURNALIST
The controversy surrounding the University of Ghana’s academic fees for the 2025/2026 academic year has revealed a problem, that extends beyond the announced increases.
What began as public outrage over reported fee hikes of more than 25 percent has evolved into a broader conversation about how the total cost of University education is determined and who ultimately bears the cost of what can be described as a burden. Students’ concerns are understandable.
The provisional fee schedule shows significant increase across the various colleges, raising worries and grave concerns, that higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable, costly and a heavy toll or burden for the average Ghanaian.
The Management of the University of Ghana, has since clarified, that a significant portion of the increase is not the result of new academic fees imposed by the institution, but rather third-party charges approved by student leadership, through the Student Representative Council, SRC and the Graduate Student Association of Ghana, GRASAG, structures.
According to the Pro Vice-Chancellor, Professor Gordon Awandare, the University’s core academic fees have remained largely unchanged since 2022, despite rising utility and operational costs. In that context, Management argues, that a base academic fee of about two thousand Ghana Cedis per academic year, cannot reasonably be described as excessive.
Yet for students and parents, such distinctions offer little practical relief. Whether charges originate from University Management or student’s governance structures, they are paid together. Levies for hostel development, hall utilities, student programmes and optional services combine to produce a final figure that many students struggle to meet and can afford.
This is where the question of regulation and oversight comes into sharper focus. While the Ghana Tertiary Education Commission’s guidance, primarily relates to academic fees set by Universities, the sharp rise in overall student charges exposes a coordination gap within the system.
When different authorities, such as University Management, student leadership and halls set fees independently, the cumulative impact can undermine affordability, even if no single body breaches regulatory instructions. The SRC’s own response illustrates both the pressures and the limits of student governance.
Corrections to the Telecel data charge, the opt-in option and negotiations that reduced a proposed 29 percent hall fee increase to 20 percent, shows responsiveness to student concerns.
The proposed SRC hostel project, intended to ease accommodation shortages for thousands of students, reflects longer-term welfare considerations, rather than short-term revenue generation.
At the national level, these developments intersect with broader education policy objectives. The government’s No-Fees-Stress policy, which covers academic facility user fees for first-year students in public tertiary institutions, was introduced to reduce entry barriers and widen access.
But this significant intervention, intended to relieve the financial stress on parents and students, risk being undermined if other components of students costs continue to rise without coordination. This is not a case against realistic pricing or institutional sustainability.
Though public Universities face genuine financial pressures and Student Leaders are justified in pursuing initiatives that enhance campus life, the major concern however, lies in the absence of a holistic framework for assessing the total cost borne by students, a gap that allows well-intentioned decisions to translate into unintended hardship.
Public Universities exist to advance national interest, not merely to balance their books. Protecting access to higher education therefore requires more than keeping tuition in check; it calls for coherence, transparency, and restraint in all charges that students across the various colleges are expected to pay.
Until the total cost of University education is managed in a coordinated way, arguments over who imposed which fee will remain secondary to the real concern, that is, higher education is steadily drifting beyond the reach of too many Ghanaian students and making it only affordable and accessible for the rich.
