The University of the West Indies (UWI) has transformed its law faculty into a self-financing entity, which has responded by rolling back subsidised tuition for its student enrollees.

The 40-year-old law faculty was told it had to start paying its own way after the Government cut the subsidy to the UWI by some $700 million, from $7.59 billion in 2008, to $6.9 billion this year.

Starting September, law will be taking in more students at significantly higher tuition fees quoted in US dollars.

New students will now pay US$10,000 (J$890,000), just US$400, or J$35,588, less than what the university says is the full economic cost to deliver the programme each year.

This system mirrors one introduced six years ago in the equally popular Faculty of Medical Sciences. (see related story on Page C2.)

Under the new scheme for law students, 80 applicants will be accepted at the Government-subsidised fee of J$201,011 per year.

The faculty is planning to take in 200 students, of which 120 would be required to pay the full cost.

It is those students with the highest grades who tend to qualify for the limited subsidies now available.

Last year, the faculty had about 68 students, who paid a subsidised $183,000 each for the programme.

The UWI is promoting the change as a necessary expansion to enable the law and medicine programmes to pay for themselves, while addressing the problem of limited space.

expanding

"We have had a law programme which was originally subsidised. All we are doing now is expanding the same thing into a self-financing programme," said Dr Derrick McCoy, law faculty representative at Mona.

"The full economic cost of the programme on the campus is US$10,400 per year per student. We have charged the students a little less. With scholarships and bursaries, it can be significantly less. We would love to take everyone, but it is not possible. We are trying to do our best to take as many qualified applicants as we can."

Bursaries are said to range in value from US$1,000 to US$4,000 and are awarded on the basis of need.

The UWI is also trumpeting what it says are efficiency gains from its decision to scrap the historical trek of Jamaican students to Barbados for the second and third years of the undergraduate law degree, part of the campus-sharing objective originally designed to give UWI students a truly Caribbean orientation at a regional institution.

The cost of the Barbados leg of the law programme has been calculated by the UWI at US$16,800 per annum.

In recent years, the UWI has received increased competition from Jamaica's other universities, Northern Caribbean University and the University of Technology, as well as overseas institutions, like the University of London, which have introduced law programmes entirely based in Jamaica and, therefore, seen as more cost competitive.

But the UWI is maintaining that the competition has not reduced the demand for the UWI law programme.

Applications for law places continue to outstrip by far, the number of available places, said principal of the Norman Manley Law School Professor Stephen Vascianne.

In June, Vascianne said the law school got more than 1,800 applications each year for its law degree, with applications said to be also on the rise for acceptance to the Norman Manley Law School, where holders of the law degree gain the Legal Education Certificate that qualifies them to practise.

The professor - speaking at the launch of Paige and Haisley, a new law firm started by two recent graduates of the Norman Manley Law School - said Norman Manley can now accommodate 126 students per year for the two-year programme.

new cohort

The new cohort of law students expected in September will nearly triple last year's intake.

"I am satisfied that we will take more students this year than we did last year, because we now have the advantage of the self-financing programme. We are doing our best to broaden opportunities," said Dr McCoy.

"These are things that we have to expand on our own. We are not getting the support we need from the Government, but we are doing the best we can. This is true for every department. All departments are not getting the help they used to."

avia.collinder@gleanerjm.com