Higher Educational Cost-Sharing, Dual-Track Tuition Fees, and Higher Educational Access: The East African Experience

Abstract

Three universal demands characterize higher education globally: the demand for higher quality, for increased access, and for greater equity. In East Africa, where resources are highly constrained, no nation has been able to meet these demands on the basis of public expenditures alone. Instead countries have had to increase resources from nonpublic sources, including tuition fees. In countries with strong resistance to tuition fees and where the difficulty of taxation is combined with a daunting queue of competing public sector needs, a dual-track tuition policy is especially popular whereby the most capable applicants are financed from public resources and other qualified students are allowed admission on a fee-paying basis. This article studies dual-track policies in Tanzania, Kenya, and Uganda. We find that although rewarding ability, the dual-track policies did little to offer opportunities for the poor.

This article was presented at the IREDU Conference on Economics of Education, Dijon France, June 2006

Notes

¹Not only are taxes difficult to collect, especially in developing and transitional countries, but the marginal net revenue—after the increasing costs of collection and the higher levels of escape and avoidance—begins to decline as the level of regressivity likely increases.

²The research at Makerere was undertaken in the context of dissertation research by Carrol (2004).

³2006/07 Academic Year.

⁴US$1 = Ush 1,810.3.

⁵1995–96 exchange rates US$1 = 1,065 Ush and 2002–03 US$1 = 1,783 Ush.

⁶2004 exchange rate US$1 = 78.194 Ksh.

⁷2004 exchange rate US$1 = 78.194 Ksh.

⁸At present (2007) there appears to still be a distinction between government sponsored students who pay a lower (largely deferred) tuition fee and privately sponsored students who pay a higher (but also largely deferred) tuition fee.

⁹2004 exchange rate: US$1 = 1,089.33 Tsh.

¹⁰Although the number of privately sponsored students grew from 106 in 1992–93 to 289 in 2001–02, it remained at about 3% of total enrollments throughout the period (Ishengoma, 2004).