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

Particularly, the agency raised the alarm that the institutions increased tuition fees from N200,000 to N2 million.

Executive Director of 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 N200,000 (last year), but this year, they had like N2 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 N1 million, over N1 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. (The Guardian, but headline rejigged)