Realising SDG4 is more than creating university places
When more than 30 education ministers, education experts, civil society members and youth representatives met on 10 July at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris to take stock of progress made since UNESCO’s first Transforming Education Summit in New York in 2022, the message was that achieving the Sustainable Development Goal 4 (SDG4) to ensure inclusive, equitable and quality education for all by 2030 has gone backwards in the past 4 years.
Governments are grappling with rising debts and living costs, and education budgets, especially for higher education, are taking a back seat, the meeting was told.
At the University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji, this is felt by both the students and lecturers, with students saying that they are sometimes forced to skip meals or walk to university as the costs of living are skyrocketing due to the global economic crisis triggered by the Iran War.
As 3rd-year journalism student Niko Ratumaimuri notes, with expenses such as food, accommodation, transportation, and study materials rapidly increasing, it is “placing significant strain on students and their families, affecting not only their finances but also their academic performance and well-being”.
Rising living costs
A student from the Solomon Islands says that these rising living costs are “really making me anxious about graduating someday”.
Lecturers at USP also say that they have noted how financial pressures are affecting their students’ performances, with many remote students being unable to access Wi-Fi to attend online lectures and submit assignments.
While tuition fees are often considered the largest expense associated with higher education, students say many hidden costs are making university life increasingly difficult.
“Universities cannot claim to work towards the SDGs if they themselves are not actively seeking to be an inclusive institution, as advocated by SDG 4,” argues Dr Jamil Salmi, a global tertiary education expert.
“Thus, they must be aware of the financial and non-monetary barriers faced by their students and put in place measures and programmes to overcome these obstacles,” he told University World News in an online interview.
Dr Subhash Appana, senior lecturer in management and public administration at USP, told UWN that if the cost of funding a university education goes beyond the means of families, “there is a very real possibility” that they may forgo a university education for their children.
He argues that USP already subsidises the education for Pacific students, and any extra assistance needs to be carefully targeted, such as for “those students who are unable to visit USP centres that have Wi-Fi connectivity”.
The Interim President of the USP Students Association (USPSA), Adi Alesi Cama, said in an interview with UWN that the Pacific culture is such that students haven’t brought their concerns to them. But Cama added that USPSA is aware of the hardships faced by students.
Barriers extend beyond tuition
World Bank Head of Tertiary Education Dr Roberta Malee Bassett argues that SDG 4 is not just about ensuring that quality education exists. “It is about ensuring that all students, regardless of their socioeconomic background, can access and complete it,” she told UWN in an interview.
“For Pacific Island students, many of whom come from low-income households across geographically dispersed islands, financial barriers extend well beyond tuition. The cost of connectivity, for example, is often a decisive factor in whether a student completes their degree or not,” notes Bassett.
She added that the current financial crisis facing the region is “undermining both individual opportunity and the region's human capital base as the Pacific faces a chronic shortage of skilled technical and managerial talent, with tertiary graduates being central to addressing that gap”.
“For tertiary institutions across the region, having well-designed support schemes that cover tuition and living allowances, inter-island travel and internet access to enable the most at-risk students to complete their studies and transition into quality jobs [are essential to the development of the region],” she argues.
“World Bank research shows extremely low completion rates across the Pacific Island region, with very low initial enrolment rates and then low progression and completion rates.”
A World Bank 2022 Solomon Islands Public Expenditure Review found that spending on tertiary education was only 3% of the GDP. A similar review on Vanuatu, to be released soon, “shows a similar trend”, she says.
The USP was established in 1968 as a regional intergovernmental university to provide higher education across the South Pacific.
The main campus is in the Fijian capital Suva, with branch campuses in 14 locations across 12 Pacific Island countries. Today, USP remains one of only two regional universities in the world. It is jointly owned and governed by 12 member countries of the South Pacific Forum.
Erratic internet connections
There are hundreds of students from Fiji and overseas living in student accommodation on campus in Suva, but because of the long distances between island nations of the Pacific, many students take courses at the main Fiji campus remotely with support provided by the branch campuses. However, Internet connections are very erratic and unreliable across the Pacific.
Students have raised the question of whether, when they pay the fees, it should include a guarantee from USP that they will be provided with access to reliable Wi-Fi services.
Bassett argues that quality education requires more than academic programmes.
“In geographically dispersed Pacific Island countries, electricity and broadband connectivity are foundational infrastructure that determine whether a student in a remote outer island community can access the digital learning environment that higher education increasingly depends on.”
In April, USP Council announced a FJD$1 million (US$0.45 million) student hardship and bursary support package to protect students and their families from the rising cost pressures associated with the global fuel crisis.
“Too often our Pacific communities bear a disproportionate share of the consequences of global crises to which we have contributed least – flowing from conflicts far beyond our region,” noted Pro-Chancellor and Chair of the Interim Management Group Siosiua Utoikamanu in a statement published on the USP website in April.
“Our responsibility as the university serving the Pacific is to ensure that our students are not asked to carry that burden alone.”
More affordable housing for students on campus, making more bursaries available for needy students, and subsidised meals at the campus canteens could be some of the measures that can be funded by this assistance scheme.
Cama agrees that such assistance is needed, and she told UWN that the association was not directly informed before the USP’s funding announcement, and they are yet to find out the criteria under which that expenditure will be spent.
She said that the USPSA will take up with the USP Council these suggestions for subsidies and also the concerns of remote students for reliable Wi-Fi connectivity.
“We have reps from all the schools. So if only these reps can gather their students together, discuss and bring these concerns to us, we can take the students’ voice, their opinions and complaints, to our committee and then can be taken up with the University Council,” she told UWN.
“Students are really facing hardships because of the economic crisis.”