Students, Numbers Up For National University
The Fiji National University has forecast an income of $150 million for the 2018 academic year.
Vice Chancellor Professor Nigel Healey said before the start of every academic year he would have a sit down with all faculty deans and plan out their forecast student enrolments for the year.
“From that we can work on the budget in terms of what we are expecting to earn from student tuition fees and then allocate and share the government grant,” Professor Healey said.
“We are expecting an increase in student enrolments in 2018 of about eight to nine per cent which is building on the nine per cent increase last year. And we are expecting our forecast income to be in the order of $150m.”
FNU has had a significant increase in student numbers since its decline in 2015. “In 2017 our student numbers increased by about 10 per cent and we are forecasting a similar increase in 2018,” he said.
“There has been a major turnaround in the university and we also recognise that one of the reasons we lost market share was that some of our facilities were not fit for purpose.
“We have been making huge investments in upgrading the quality of our existing facilities and in building new facilities.” He said upgrade works within the university saw $2m being spent on repairs and maintenance in 2016, $5m in 2017 and $9m this year.
“We have made a huge investment in both library and ICT. We have an open learning project in the library to change it from a book depository to being an open social learning space where all teaching materials are, like journals, books are available electronically online so that is quite a major transformation.
“We have signed a contract to connect the university directly to the landing station which will mean we have dramatically increased broadband speeds that will support and pave the way for major expansion in distance learning provisions so we will be offering more of our programmes in distance learning.”
Professor Healey said since 2015 the university has had major focus on strengthening its academic portfolio by improving their quality of programmes particularly in graduate outcomes and graduate employability.