All EU universities charge fees to non-EU students, as far as I know. I have always had to pay fees as a non-EU student. There were certain exceptions for economically disadvantaged, but everyone else paid. Keep in mind, most students outside North America are paid for by their home governments. The same is true in North America, except that here EVERYONE pays.
If Finland is not charging non-EU, then that is the best deal on Earth. I wish I had known. On the plus side, the Congress just appropriated the most money for higher education ever, increased student subsidies, grants and loans, reduced the criteria for obtaining financial assistance, increased the ability of working people to deduct the cost of higher education/training from their tax bills, and tens of billions for basic research. Its not the whole kaboodle, but its a start. Of course, if you get all your news on IRC, you might have missed this. Mike W ----------- There is vastly more on the negative side. The stimulus package increases affordability to a limited degree, but why should access to a human right be determined by affordability as measured by individual means? Accessibility to public higher education in the United States is declining and appears set to continue declining for the near-term future. Mike W may live in an alternate universe. At my university, about the largest in the United States, the economic crisis and state budget cuts are not just a nightmare, it's an extinction event. The university's historic old campus will survive, although its buildings may be a lot emptier. A new downtown campus, with 7500 students and the smallest, will survive. Two other campuses, representing nearly 17,500 students, are at risk. Despite the stimulus package, probably another $152 million will be cut from the state contribution to the university budget for the upcoming fiscal year, meaning that at least one campus will be shut down. Entire faculties have disappeared and more are slated to go. About 48 degree programs have been terminated. Over 1,000 of our faculty and staff have been laid off; as many or more will disappear in coming budget cuts. Everyone is on rotating furlough days, with a resulting 10-15 percent pay cut. Fall admissions are being ended in one week, or five months early, which will mean 3-5,000 fewer entering students. Those who do enter will face much higher tuition, possibly as much as double. This may not help the university, though, because the state is now sweeping positive-balance accounts into general funds. The stimulus package's Pell grants increases will not meet the probable tuition hikes. Several structural changes are occurring in Arizona higher education, changes that appear in more extreme form here due to the local political climate created by right-to-far-right domination of the state legislature. One is a massive new limitation on the goal of expanded public access to higher education. Opponents of expanded higher education have never been lacking in this state. They believe that education is a commodity to be purchased, not a public service or human right. Public financial support for higher education -- or any other level of education -- contradicts a philosophical predisposition against taxes. The growth of the campuses slated for potential closure has been driven by first-generation college students from the Hispanic, Native American and other minority communities. When programs are cut or closed, their opportunities disappear. For example, admissions to the RN degree program have been halved because it is a very expensive program that needs substantial public subsidy. The public university tuition is $5700 annually; a private commercial school charges over $40K annual tuition for its RN degree program (also 80-90 percent of private college students fail the licensing exam, whereas a similar percentage of public university students pass). Educational access is simply disappearing, with minorities especially hard hit. Another structural change within the institution is the conversion of already-contingent teaching labor into even-more contingent labor. Three-year rolling contract lecturers are being converted into one-year fixed-term lecturers. Instructors with benefits and one-year contracts are being offered faculty associate positions without benefits and on semester-by-semester contracts. Across the university, the proportion of untenured faculty to tenure-track faculty continues to rise. The administration is using the budget crisis to implement its long-desired goal of lower-cost and more flexible labor. There are massive changes in internal administrative structure towards consolidation and cost-cutting. The basic scheme is to take three or four departments, each with their own chair and staff, and re-organize them into schools with one director and a consolidated reduced staff. One result will be reduction in the role of faculty governance, which has already been declining at the departmental level. The basic trends are all negative. When the next wave of layoffs hit, as they surely will since the federal stimulus monies provide no salvation, the effects will be worse than catastrophic. The damages occurring now to public higher education in Arizona are of generational proportions. How does one rebuild a campus where the students, staff and faculty have all been dispersed? Words almost fail. Anger does not. Arizona students and public university faculty have protested, although the latter are limited by their civil service status. These protests will be of little or no avail given current right-wing control of state government. Nettime traffic has brought reports of Finnish and French protest actions in opposition to education budget cuts that are modest relative to the extreme happening here. The basic formation of the neo-liberal university is under enormous stress due to the global economic crisis, stress due heavily to its conceptual formulation as an integral element of corporate social existence. The language of investment that has dominated US higher education has been adopted in too many other university systems. Global proliferation of resistance to these concepts and educational practices is a hopeful sign. Joe Lockard English Department Arizona State University # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mail.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected]
