The Vice Chancellor of the Edo University, Iyamho, EUI, has stated that the University is meant to cater for the educational needs of the rich and not the poor.
The statement was made by the institution’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Emmanuel Aluyor, on Monday in Iyamho-Uzairue, in the Estako-West local government area of Edo state.
The academic while speaking to newsmen stated that “the idea behind the establishment of the University by the founding fathers is neither to replace nor compete with the existing Ambrose Alli University, Ekpoma”.
Edo University.
“But rather, to complement it in terms of providing world-class education with the best of infrastructure to academically-gifted students and the rich, who can afford the fees.
“People have questioned why former Gov. Adams Oshiomhole did not upgrade AAU, than establishing a new university altogether.
“Apart from its being capital-intensive to either renovate or bring in the needed infrastructure, the idea was to provide a different brand of education to the people.”
He further added that the University offers world-class education and state-of-the art facilities hence justifying the high fees paid by the students of the institution.
He added that the tuition for the university ranges from between N400, 000 and N450, 000 a session.
He added: “And that depends on which perspective you are looking at it. If it is from the perspective of a private university, our fees are very low indeed, because there is no private university that charges anything lower than what we offer.
“And only one or two public universities charge the same fees as us and that also depends on the quality of infrastructure and programmes on offer. The idea of the founding fathers is for anyone to have an ambiance of everything he desires abroad in any university environment here.”
He added that the university management has assembled top of the range academic and non-academic staff to compliment the standard infrastructure on ground and ensure that students of the institution are well catered for.
“We have, therefore, set up facilities for entrepreneurship training for all our students, irrespective of their course of study, to make them to become independent on graduation. We are proposing a grant of between N5 million and N10 million for any graduating student with the best entrepreneurship proposal.
“The University Council is still trying to fine-tune the modalities.”
He continued: “I am proud to mention that we have a dress code among our students, while all our lectures are multi-media assisted. We may not be proud of this information that in our first year, we had less than 80 students admitted. But I can tell you that we had cause to expel four of them.
“We may be young; but it does not mean we will accept every Dick and Harry as students. I think what we did was showing capacity to instil discipline. We have also had cause to sanction three members of staff. We are not happy to have sent them into the unemployment market.
“But we are saying that if you can not measure up with the standard we have set down, you certainly can’t be part of the vision of the founding fathers of this university.”