In an opinion piece in today’s edition of Diario Libre it was claimed that the country would do better if the RD$7.12 billion budget allotted to the state university UASD was distributed among private universities. The author of the opinion piece (signed Castillo), stated that recent statistics provided by the university indicate that the UASD graduates 10,794 students per year at a cost to taxpayers of RD$660,366 per student. But the author points out that the cost of graduating from the private Santo Domingo Technological Institute (INTEC), the alma mater of President Danilo Medina, is only RD$450,000. The author suggests renting out the UASD installations to private schools and providing Dominican students scholarships to study where they choose. The author suggests that the same academic rules and standards should be applied in this university system, stressing that good students making adequate progress will remain academically eligible to continue their studies and productive professors will be encouraged to stay in the system. “There will not be strikes, there will not be hooded vandals roaming the campus and there will no longer be 20-year professional students “studying” and wasting my taxes,” he comments in the open letter.
http://www.diariolibre.com/opinion/2014/04/02/i551941_cerrar-uasd-pagar-los-estudios.html