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Students urge govt to scrap self-finance scheme
Lahore, June 17, 2008: The recent announcement of Punjab Chief Minister regarding
abolition of self-finance scheme for admission to the medical colleges has given
hope to hundreds of prospective students of engineering, pharmacy and other
demand driven disciplines.
They are of the view that the government
should ensure merit based admission in all disciplines without any
discrimination. They believe self-finance scheme for admissions in engineering,
other professional studies and even in general education was also depriving
deserving students as were being deprived in medical colleges.
Talking to
us, a number of students welcomed the recent decision regarding abolition
self-finance scheme for admission to medical colleges of the province.
Nonetheless they demanded the government to abolish such schemes from all the
institutions offering professional as well as general education.
Fahad, a
student, said admission on self-finance basis should be abolished from all the
public sector colleges and universities so that admission and educational
facilities could be provided only to intelligent and deserving students. He was
of the view that discipline of engineering and pharmacy were as important as
that of medical.
He said students now hoped that the government would
also make efforts to eliminate self-finance schemes from other colleges and
universities especially those offering professional education.
Another
student, Bilal, said seats reserved for self finance quota should be merged with
merit seats so that more and more talented students could avail the opportunity
to study at public sector institutions. He said poor but talented students could
not afford education in private sector institutions because these were costly as
compared to public sector institutions.
According to the Punjab
University (PU) website a student seeking admission on self-finance basis has to
pay Rs 2, 50,000 for admission in, any one of, pharmacy, architecture and
engineering programme of the university whereas Rs 200,000 are charged from a
student seeking admission in BBA (Hons) in Banking and Finance, Insurance and
Risk Management, MBA, BCom and MCom etc under the said scheme.
Similarly,
the Government College University (GCU), Lahore College for Women University
(LCWU), Kinnaird College and many other public sector colleges and universities
of the province offer admission on self finance basis.
However, those
who are at the helm are very critical of the emerging situation saying
self-finance scheme for admission was introduced by the government for resource
generation adding seats on financial basis were normally over and above the
merit seats.
Talking to us, vice-chancellors (VCs) of various
public sector universities said universities were ready to drop the self-finance
scheme provided that government ensured matching grants as resource generation
was certainly a tough job.
"All the universities do not conduct
examinations or grant affiliations like the Punjab University", said one of the
VCs, on condition of anonymity, adding these exercises were certainly sources of
revenue. "But this is not the case with all the universities," he said adding
that admissions on self-finance basis were certainly helping institutions
generate their resources.
He said if the government ensured provision of
appropriate funding for universities, public sector institutions would not
hesitate to abolish self finance scheme for admission in all the
disciplines. The News
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