Determining the Unit Cost of Higher Education:
Date
2011
Authors
Olweny, Mark R. O.
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
While the growth in private universities in Africa has met a pent-up demand for
university education and are meeting and fulfilling a social function, the economic
realities of operating a university cannot be ignored. It is therefore no surprise that
within two decades of their founding, private universities are now faced with the
reality of the interstices of global economic forces, national societal functions and,
for many, ideological mandates that now compel them to rethink the models that
the institutions were founded upon. Increasingly, private universities are discovering
the dependency complications related to a reliance on a single income source,
which is on the whole unsustainable, as they are operating in an environment characterized
by much uncertainty. There is a need for private universities to know how
to generate additional income to fund not only their operations, but also to ensure
an annualised profit as a buffer against any inevitable fluctuations.
This paper provides an overview of the cost of associated with teaching in the Faculty
of the Built Environment at the Uganda Martyrs University. While the faculty offers
a twenty-first century curriculum with an innovative teaching pedagogy, the faculty
faces a challenge in using a higher education program financing model that does
not acknowledge varying educational pedagogies, as is necessary in a professional
program. Under the current model, the faculty is unable to achieve parity in its
budget. The proposed model is based on an appreciation of the different inputs in
architecture education, and while they are debatable, it does provide a starting point
for dialogue of teaching inputs. The paper concludes by giving some proposals that
may be useful to help manage expenditure in individual faculties.
Description
Keywords
Unit cost, Higher education funding, Institutions, Remuneration, Workload, Quality assurance