Near the end of every academic year, students from the Junior Colleges around the country start to make preparations to transfer to different tertiary institutions, be it local, regional, or international.
And that is always a stressful process because often times, they have to be accepted into the school, and they must prove that they have the financing to afford it.
They have one other additional burden in which they must painstakingly and tediously go through all their courses that they've taken over the 2 years to see if they will be accepted at the new institution to count toward their bachelor's degree.
Well, one group of students, led by their professor Patrick Menzies, has come out swinging at the University of Belize. That's because according to them, UB rejects a lot of credits and courses offered by junior colleges which count toward the undergraduate degree, and most of the time, those rejected courses are the same ones offered by the University.
The second issue is that they say UB over-charges Bachelor's students by 300 percent when they offer those same per-requisite courses to Associates students for far less.
They say they've conducted intensive study on this issue, and today, they presented findings to media.
Liannie Torres – UB Student
"What happens when these courses are not being transferred; we have some students that fight for it that follow some procedures in showing their course outlines etc to see what could be done. In most cases what happens is that the paper sits there and they are not being revised at the time so when the time comes to register. The student registers for the course because there are courses that are not offered in really scarce times so the student then decides that since he is having problems with transferability he decides to take the same course that didn't transfer so now as research, one of the students he was about to take the exam; when he got to know that his course did transfer so what does this mean so he has wasted money and most importantly the student has wasted time."
Nichole Zetina – Bachelor's Student, UB
"Bachelor students must retake associate classes at UB and pay a bachelor fee. Associate classes are priced at $29.00 per class while bachelor classes are priced at $90.00 per class, therefore, bachelor students are being charged 300% the real cost of associate level classes; this is 61.00 over charging per each class that the student has to retake. The ATLIB community looked at courses at the junior college level to ensure that all courses that are 80% compatible with all UB courses get transferred to the University. The goal of this committee is to achieve 100% transferability from junior colleges to the University of Belize. The practice at UB, however, is that some advisers accept these classes while some do not. UB then decides that students must retake classes as a prerequisite and then charges that student a bachelor fee for an associate class. UB is then raping the bachelor students at 300%, the real cost of associate level classes. There are bachelor students taking prerequisite classes sitting in a classroom with associate students and paying 270.00 meanwhile their associate classmates are only paying 87.00 per for the same class, therefore, the Ministry of Education is also being ripped for bachelor students who they provide a scholarship to. For every one student that the Ministry is paying for, they could have been helping three students"
We hope to get a response from UB tomorrow.
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