Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Discrimination against part-time students?

A continuing storm has flared up again in our university. Some part-time students are complaining that the student union is discriminating against them. Because part-time students cannot join the student union. Part-time students cannot enjoy benefits such as lockers, free fax service, reduced price stationary, sports facilities, medical clinic, reduced fees for the MTR, ..., cannot play on the university sports teams, ...

Most part-time students cannot enjoy certain benefits such as joining the student union (they also do not have to pay the union dues) because these benefits are for full-time government-subsidized students only. The student union does not have the authority to change that.

Most part-time students actually pay higher fees for the same number of credits in comparison with their full-time counterparts, because they are not subsized by the government. They are supposed to be self-financed - paying the full cost of the education. In actual fact, they pay roughly one and a half times more than the government-subsidized full-time students. Considering that the full-time students pay only about 18% of the actual cost per student ... the part-time students are still subsidized, just not to the same extent as the full-time students.

The bigger question is: should the government provide more subsidy for higher education for more students? In comparison to countries and regions at a similar stage of development, fewer students can enter university in Hong Kong. So the answer is probably a yes.





2 comments:

-- RAYMOND -- said...

I also agree with.

某烨 said...

mary and i just talked about this topic. she is going to change her module into part-time and she said she knew she wouldn't enjoy as much benefit as full-time student do, but before watching that post, she didn't expect that the difference is so large.
maybe that's why we pay so much as full-time students. well, i pay even more than local students. 1.5 times.