Every year UCU increases tuition fees by a given percentage. Originally 10% it is now 13%.   
   That may be said to be a necessary development, given the unpredictable rate of inflation in the country. However, the question that keeps lingering in some of our minds is whether the students are getting what they are paying for.

  It is a question of value for money. It is one thing to pay expensively for a service but another thing altogether to get a service far less valuable than the amount of money that you have paid for.
   Take, for instance, the ICT services in the university. Less than two years ago, the university promised students a faster Internet; but it seems the situation has grown from bad to worse. Compared to all the other places I have been to in a bid to access the Internet, I can say that UCU’s Internet is the slowest. It is only at UCU that I always fail to access my mail in the latest Gmail versions. I always have to resort to the basic version. I cannot use Google documents since they require a faster Internet, which I cannot access. So I always have to move around with flash disks to store some important data yet I would have taken advantage of the latest technology.
    Besides, accessing computer services has become such a tedious affair since the few computers that UCU has are being used for teaching. I believe students should have access to computers as and when they need them and not only during a few scheduled moments.
     The problem with that is that students are doing different things at any given moments and scheduling only a few moments makes many students miss out on accessing some of these services yet they need them.  
     The biggest, if not the only, computer centre that is open to “all” students is at the University ICT Services (UIS) former centre. If we calculated the time that centre is open to students and when there are no classes in that place, it would barely make 35 hours a week.  
    The other computer centre which is open for more hours is in Nsibambi Hall but even there, of late the computers are simply slow. You may find yourself spending an entire day on work that should take  less than an hour just because of the slow speed of the computers.
    Such are the services that our parents are paying an arm and a leg for. It is such a pity. If UCU is going to keep increasing fees, then it should be mindful of improving some of its services because, honestly, when my parent sacrifices close to two million shillings (as a non-resident student, residents pay close to 2.5 million shillings) to send me to the “centre of excellence in the heart of Africa,” then I believe we deserve better. 
   It is high time we got the real value for our money.