By David Vranicar
dav@adm.au.dk
Huge grant reductions in Italy. Staggering costs and crippling loans in the United States. A perceived influence of private interests at universities in Germany.
The specific issues are as different as the languages.
Aided by Web-based groups like the International Student Movement (ISM), the economics of education is flowering into a collaborative, worldwide issue. Students have long voiced griev-ances about education, but thanks to the Internet – not to mention the current economic malaise – the voices are growing louder and more coordinated.
But even so, Danish is one language that isn’t heard as often as many others. While groups like the ISM provide a platform for concerned students from the U.S. to Italy, Indonesia to Germany, Denmark remains largely insulated from many of the ails afflicting other nations.
With involvement that spans the globe, the International Student Movement has emerged as one of the Web’s eminent gathering places for the cause of higher-education reform. According to Mo
Schmidt, who promotes and organises various initiatives for the group, the ISM has had participants from no less than 60 countries.
Different groups from around the world tout different ideas – such as reducing the amount of tuition or ousting private interests from the university system – but the main themes of the ISM and many other student groups revolve around the economy.
“The problem itself is actually structural; it’s a problem of the economic system,” says Schmidt, a student at Marburg University in Germany. “And what we can observe around the world are just symptoms of this economic system.”
Angelo Nicolosi has seen the symptoms. A native of Italy, he came to Aarhus in 2008 as an undergraduate exchange student. He quickly became enamoured with Denmark’s education system – especially when he compared it to Italy.
“(Attending university) is a huge problem in Italy,” says Nicolosi, who is still at AU getting a Master’s in computer science. “On the one hand they are cutting funding for universities, on the other hand they are modifying the rules to permit universities to become private institutions. The only way universities can survive is to become private, so they are really destroying the public university system.”
Nicolosi, who himself became involved with the ISM two years ago, mentions recent reductions that axed 90 percent of Italy’s grant funding: “Already it was difficult to get a grant, and now you have 90 percent less chance of getting one. It will be crazy.”
In Germany, the increased “commercialisation of education” has frustrated students like Schmidt. He points to Goethe University in Frankfurt/Main, where he worries that private financial support of professors and departments could shape the interests of the university.
“The university itself is supposed to be a public institution,” Schmidt says, “but the influence of the business community is rising.”
This type of angst can also be found in the United States. A 2008 graduate of a university in Connecticut, Wes Strong has been involved with the ISM and numerous other education reform initiatives. He fears that rises in tuition costs – which can run upwards of DKK 200,000 per year – will make higher education inaccessible to millions of students.
“It drastically reduces the amount of access people have to education,” says Strong. “Particularly for people who come from low-income or working families – it has the effect of making education so costly that certain people just can’t afford to go. So in that sense it’s really pricing a lot of people out of the prospect of ever attending higher education.”
Such concerns have helped fuel the “Global Wave of Action.” Promoted by the ISM, the Global Wave of Action is a two-month series of events that culminates at the end of November. It boasts participants from four continents and numerous countries.
But not Denmark.
In many ways, the Danish university system is insulated from the issues that afflict students in other parts of the world. All Danish universities are entirely public and funded by the government; there are no tuition fees for Danes. What’s more, every Danish student receives a monthly grant of roughly DKK 5,000.
“Of course we are very much aware of the state of higher education in Europe and around the world,” says Lena Scotte, Vice President of the National Union of Students in Denmark. “In more and more countries, the tuition fees are higher than ever before. And of course in comparison we are quite lucky in Denmark.”
Thea Puggaard Fredericksen, the Aarhus University Student Council Chairperson, says that not everything is perfect: there are politicians who insist on reforming the system, and despite free tuition, cuts have already been made in certain university departments.
Still, she says that Danish students know and appreciate the way their education works.
“Basically society encourages us to go to school because there is an agreement that students and young people in general need to get an education,” she says. “I think most students feel pretty good. I think a lot of Danes feel privileged. I think we are aware that the situation in Denmark is somewhat different from the situation in the rest of the world – in a good way.”
