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Introduction
Knowledge has been placed as the driver of every nation’s economic competitiveness. With the rising emphasis on the knowledge-based economy, the importance of quality education through which people acquire knowledge, attitude and skill is becoming a global agenda. The new reality has clearly led to educational reformation at all levels including the higher educational institutions (HEIs). For HEIs, the expectation is that the education systems provide a pathway for the present and emerging economies through offering higher education programmes of the highest quality. Hence, to sustain in the academic world, HEIs have no choice but to compete by offering a good education experience. In producing quality output, the standard of input and the training process also have to be of high quality. Accordingly, HEIs should make continuous efforts to enhance the quality of the programmes offered, as well as the academic staff and the supporting facilities. These are the higher educational dimensions that are the commodification and marketization factors for today’s higher education sector (De Haan, 2015).
The present requirements, however, have enormous financial and management implications. The demand for greater quality of the educational structure has placed HEIs under immense pressure to allocate more funds and resources towards supporting the delivery process. The situation has major implications for the institutions, particularly in dealing with the ability to finance the activities. Activities consume resources that consequently trigger costs, which have be set against incomes. Understandably, charging educational tuition fees is the main source of income. Albeit there are sources of income, such as industrial grants and contribution, tuition fees constitute the core revenue for HEIs. A tuition fee generally refers to a mandatory charge levied upon students covering some portion of the general underlying costs of instruction. A non-instructional fee, however, refers to a charge levied to recover all or most of the expenses associated with a particular institutionally provided good or service that is frequently partaken by some but not all students, such as the costs of food and lodging, or of health and transportation services, and which might, in other circumstances, be privately provided (Marcucci and Johnstone, 2007). Apart from offering higher quality education services, the reformation poses a new challenge to the HEIs to be able to balance between rendering a...