Main political parties vow to make access to tertiary education easier

By: Admin

Image caption: Lisa Hanna and Floyd Green

The Jamaica Labour Party and People's National Party have pledged to make it easier for persons to access tertiary education.

Funding for tertiary education has been a perennial problem, with scores of students yearly facing deregistration.

During Tuesday night's national debate, the teams responded to how their administration would improve funding of tertiary education.

The People's National Party's Lisa Hanna said a PNP administration will provide one student from every household, a scholarship to attend university. 

"Every family now, qualifying for university in Jamaica is not an exception anymore, it is a rule. And so, we will provide volunteerism to help, we will make sure that students even don't have to have a guarantor to get to the Student Loan Bureau....We want to be able to give equity, access across the board, and make sure that every family has a student. So under our pledge, we will ensure that one child per household gets a scholarship to go to university, and we know what that can do," she said. 

JLP debate team member Floyd Green said a Jamaica Labour Party administration would further reduce interest rates on student loans. 

"The first thing we did when we came to government, we reduced the student loan interest rate from 12 per cent to nine per cent. The next JLP government will reduce it by a further one per cent. We will also ensure that you have a longer time to repay, because we know if we lower the burden of repayment, more people will repay," he asserted.