Student Loan: NELFUND flags 900% fee hike in 10 tertiary institutions

The Nigerian Education Loan Fund (NELFUND) has raised alarm that 10 tertiary institutions have jerked up their institutional fees by 900 per cent for the current academic session.

The agency raised concerns that the institutions increased tuition fees from ₦200,000 to ₦2 million.

Executive Director, Operations at the Fund, Mustapha Iyal, stated this during the agency’s media engagement in Abuja on Thursday.

He, however, clarified that the Fund’s system promptly flagged down the applications, and they were denied.

He, however, did not reveal the names of the institutions involved.

The Executive Director questioned the rationale for the astronomical increase, knowing that such funds would eventually be repaid by the students.

He said: “We have a structure on how we confirm (institutional) fees. I’ll give you an example: just yesterday (Wednesday), we stopped some applications from going through because we checked the fees that we had last year for certain institutions. Some had like ₦200,000 (last year), but this year, they had like ₦2 million.

“We do check. And our systems always check. Not only that, we get feedback from students when they are confirming their loans to say if the institutional charges are high or low. At the moment, we have about 10 institutions that we dropped their payments just because of that.

“Some have increased with ₦1 million, over ₦1 million. We don’t know why. But we are reaching out to them to know why they are doing such. Because the students cannot pay such in the future. This is a loan.”

He said the development could undermine the student loan scheme and place undue financial strain on students and their families.