Before the automobile, before the Statue of Liberty, before the vast majority of contemporary colleges existed, the rising cost of higher education was shocking the American conscience: “Gentlemen have to pay for their sons in one year more than they spent themselves in the whole four years of their course,” The New York Times lamented in 1875.
Decadence was to blame, the writer argued: fancy student apartments, expensive meals, and “the mania for athletic sports.”
Today, the U.S. spends more on college than almost any other country, according to the 2018 Education at a Glance report released this week by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
All told, including the contributions of individual families and the government (in the form of student loans, grants, and other assistance), Americans spend about $30,000 per student a year — nearly twice as much as the average developed country. “The U.S. is in a class of its own,” says Andreas Schleicher, the director for education and skills at the OECD, and he does not mean this as a compliment. “Spending per student is exorbitant, and it has virtually no relationship to the value that students could possibly get in exchange.”
Only one country spends more per student, and that country is Luxembourg — where tuition is nevertheless free for students, thanks to government outlays. In fact, a third of developed countries offer college free of charge to their citizens. (And another third keep tuition very cheap — less than $2,400 a year.) The farther away you get from the United States, the more baffling it looks.
This back-to-school season, The Atlantic is investigating a classic American mystery: Why does college cost so much? And is it worth it?
At first, like the 19th-century writer of yore, I wanted to blame the curdled indulgences of campus life: fancy dormitories, climbing walls, lazy rivers, dining halls with open-fire-pit grills. And most of all — college sports. Certainly sports deserved blame.
On first glance, the new international data provide some support for this narrative. The U.S. ranks No. 1 in the world for spending on student-welfare services such as housing, meals, health care, and transportation, a category of spending that the OECD lumps together under “ancillary services.” All in all, American taxpayers and families spend about $3,370 on these services per student — more than three times the average for the developed world.
One reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”
But on closer inspection, the data suggest a bigger problem than fancy room and board. Even if we were to zero out all these ancillary services tomorrow, the U.S. would still spend more per college student than any other country (except, again, Luxembourg). It turns out that the vast majority of American college spending goes to routine educational operations — like paying staff and faculty — not to dining halls. These costs add up to about $23,000 per student a year — more than twice what Finland, Sweden, or Germany spends on core services. “Lazy rivers are decadent and unnecessary, but they are not in and of themselves the main culprit,” says Kevin Carey, the author of The End of College and the director of the education-policy program at New America, a nonpartisan think tank.
The business of providing an education is so expensive because college is different from other things that people buy, argue Feldman and his colleague Robert Archibald in their 2011 book, Why Does College Cost So Much? College is a service, for one thing, not a product, which means it doesn’t get cheaper along with changes in manufacturing technology (economists call this affliction “cost disease”). And college is a service delivered mostly by workers with college degrees — whose salaries have risen more dramatically than those of low-skilled service workers over the past several decades.
College is not the only service to have gotten wildly more expensive in recent decades, Feldman and Archibald point out. Since 1950, the real prices of the services of doctors, dentists, and lawyers have risen at similar rates as the price of higher education, according to Feldman and Archibald’s book. “The villain, as much as there is one, is economic growth itself,” they write.
This all makes sense, if we just focus on the U.S. But what about the rest of the world? These broader economic trends exist there, too. So why does college still cost half as much, on average, in other countries?
One oddity of America’s higher-education system is that it is actually three different systems masquerading as one: There is one system of public colleges; another of private, nonprofit institutions; and one made up of for-profit colleges.
The biggest system by far is the public one, which includes two-year community colleges and four-year institutions. Three out of every four American college students attend a school in this public system, which is funded through state and local subsidies, along with students’ tuition dollars and some federal aid.
In this public system, the high cost of college has as much to do with politics as economics. Many state legislatures have been spending less and less per student on higher education for the past three decades. Bewitched by the ideology of small government (and forced by law to balance their budgets during a period of mounting health-care costs), states have been leaving once-world-class public universities begging for money. The cuts were particularly stark after the 2008 recession, and they set off a cascading series of consequences, some of which were never intended.
The easiest way for universities to make up for the cuts was to shift some of the cost to students — and to find richer students. “Once that sustainable public funding was taken out from under these schools, they started acting more like businesses,” says Maggie Thompson, the executive director of Generation Progress, a nonprofit education-advocacy group. State cutbacks did not necessarily make colleges more efficient, which was the hope; they made colleges more entrepreneurial.
Some universities began to enroll more full-paying foreign and out-of-state students to make up the difference. Over the past decade, for example, Purdue University has reduced its in-state student population by 4,300 while adding 5,300 out-of-state and foreign students, who pay triple the tuition. “They moved away from working to educate people in their region to competing for the most elite and wealthy students — in a way that was unprecedented,” Thompson says.
This competition eventually crept beyond climbing walls and dining halls into major, long-term operating expenses. For example, U.S. colleges spend, relative to other countries, a startling amount of money on their nonteaching staff, according to the OECD data. Some of these people are librarians or career or mental-health counselors who directly benefit students, but many others do tangential jobs that may have more to do with attracting students than with learning. Many U.S. colleges employ armies of fund-raisers, athletic staff, lawyers, admissions and financial-aid officers, diversity-and-inclusion managers, building-operations and maintenance staff, security personnel, transportation workers, and food-service workers.
The international data is not detailed enough to reveal exactly which jobs are diverting the most money, but we can say that U.S. colleges spend more on nonteaching staff than on teachers, which is upside down compared with every other country that provided data to the OECD (with the exception of Luxembourg, naturally).
In addition, most global rankings of universities heavily weight the amount of research published by faculty — a metric that has no relationship to whether students are learning. But in a heated race for students, these rankings get the attention of college administrators, who push faculty to focus on research and pay star professors accordingly.
Likewise, the new data show that U.S. colleges currently have a slightly lower ratio of students to teachers than the average for the developed world — another metric favored in college rankings. But that is a very expensive way to compete. And among education researchers, there is no clear consensus about whether smaller classes are worth the money.
In the beginning, university administrators may have started competing for full-freight paying students in order to help subsidize other, less affluent students. But once other colleges got into the racket, it became a spending arms race. More and more universities had to participate, including private colleges unaffected by state cuts, just to keep their application numbers up. “There is such a thing as wasteful competition,” Charles Clotfelter, a Duke University professor and the author of Unequal Colleges in the Age of Disparity, wrote me in an email.
All that said, it’s also true that state budget cuts were uneven across the country. Today, in-state tuition in Wyoming is about a third of the cost of Vermont, for example. In places where higher education has not been gutted and the cost of living is low, an American college degree can still be a bargain — especially for students who don’t mind living at home and are poor enough to qualify for federal aid. Taking into account living expenses, says Alex Usher of the consulting firm Higher Education Strategy Associates, a student at a public university in Mississippi will likely end up with similar out-of-pocket costs as a student in Sweden.
Usher, who is based in Toronto, is one of the few researchers to have looked carefully at the costs of higher education globally. And much of what he finds is surprising. In 2010, he and his colleague Jon Medow created a clever ranking of 15 countries’ higher-education systems — using a variety of ways to assess affordability and access. Reading the report is like peeling an onion. The first layer focuses on the most obvious question: the affordability of college based on the cost of tuition, books, and living expenses divided by the median income in a given country. By this metric, the U.S. does very poorly, ranking third from the bottom. Only Mexico and Japan do worse.
But the U.S. moves up one place when grants and tax credits are included. “Your grants are actually really generous compared to everybody else,” Usher says. Tuition is higher in the U.S., so the grants don’t fully cover the price, but 70 percent of full-time students do receive some kind of grant aid, according to the College Board. From this perspective, sometimes called “net cost,” Australia is more expensive than the U.S.
Next, looking only at our public colleges, the U.S. rises higher still, ranking in the middle of the pack in Usher’s analysis, above Canada and New Zealand. This data is from 2010, and things may look less rosy if he were to redo the study now, Usher cautions. But still, he sounds weirdly hopeful. “The public system in the U.S. is working as well as most systems,” he says. “Parts of the U.S. look like France.”
The problem, of course, is that other parts of the U.S. look more like a Louis Vuitton store. America basically contains 50 different higher-education systems, one per state, each with public, private, and for-profit institutions, making generalizations all but impossible. The U.S. does relatively well on measures of access to college, but the price varies wildly depending on the place and the person. Somehow, students have to find their way through this thicket of competition and choose wisely, or suffer the consequences.
The more I studied America’s baffling higher-education system, the more it reminded me of health care. In both spaces, Americans pay twice as much as people in other developed countries—and get very uneven results. The U.S. spends nearly $10,000 a person on health care each year (25 percent more than Switzerland, the next biggest spender), according to the OECD’s 2017 Health at a Glance report, but our life expectancy is now almost two years below the average for the developed world.
“I used to joke that I could just take all my papers and statistical programs and globally replace hospitals with schools, doctors with teachers and patients with students,” says Dartmouth College’s Douglas Staiger, one of the few U.S. economists who studies both education and health care.
Both systems are more market driven than in just about any other country, which makes them more innovative — but also less coherent and more exploitive. Hospitals and colleges charge different prices to different people, rendering both systems bewilderingly complex, Staiger notes. It is very hard for regular people to make informed decisions about either, and yet few decisions could be more important.
In both cases, the most vulnerable people tend to make less-than-ideal decisions. For example, among high-achieving, low-income students (who have grades and test scores that put them in the top 4 percent of U.S. students and would be eligible for generous financial aid at elite colleges), the vast majority apply to no selective colleges at all, according to research by Caroline Hoxby and Christopher Avery. “Ironically, these students are often paying more to go to a nonselective four-year college or even a community college than they would pay to go to the most selective, most resource-rich institutions in the United States,” as Hoxby told NPR.
Meanwhile, when it comes to health care, low-income Americans tend to be less familiar with the concepts of deductibles, coinsurance rates, and provider networks, according to a variety of studies, which makes it extremely difficult to choose a health-care plan. “These are both sectors where consumers are too poorly informed and societal costs and benefits too great to leave decision-making entirely in the hands of individuals,” as Isabel Sawhill at the Brookings Institution has written.
Ultimately, college is expensive in the U.S. for the same reason MRIs are expensive: There is no central mechanism to control price increases. “Universities extract money from students because they can,” says Schleicher at the OECD. “It’s the inevitable outcome of an unregulated fee structure.” In places like the United Kingdom, the government limits how much universities can extract by capping tuition. The same is true when it comes to health care in most developed countries, where a centralized government authority contains the prices.
The U.S. federal government has historically been unwilling to perform this role. So Americans pay more for pharmaceuticals — and for college classes. Meanwhile, more and more of the risk gets shifted from government onto families, in both sectors.
At the very least, the American government could do a better job sharing information about the quality of colleges in ways everyone can understand, Schleicher says. “You can’t force people to buy good things or bad things, but they should be able to see what the value is.”
Spending a lot of money can be worth it, if you get something awesome in exchange. “America has the best colleges and universities in the world!” President Donald Trump exclaimed at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year. Former President Barack Obama said the same thing before him.
But is it actually true? No meaningful data exist on the quality of universities globally. America does have a disproportionate number of elite colleges, which accept fewer than 10 percent of applicants, and these places do employ some brilliant scholars who do groundbreaking research. But fewer than 1 percent of American students attend highly selective colleges like those.
Instead, more than three-quarters of students attend nonselective colleges, which admit at least half of their applicants. No one knows for sure how good these colleges are at their core job of educating students. But in one of the only careful, recent studies on adult skills, the OECD’s Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, Americans under age 35 with a bachelor’s degree performed below their similarly educated peers in 14 other countries on the test of practical math skills. In other words, they did only slightly better than high-school graduates in Finland. America’s college grads did better in reading, performing below just six other countries, but dropped off again in another test, scoring below 13 other countries in their ability to solve problems using digital technology.
If American colleges are not adding obvious and consistent academic value, they are adding financial value. Americans with college degrees earn 75 percent more than those who only completed high school. Over a lifetime, people with bachelor’s degrees earn more than half a million dollars more than people with no college degree in the U.S. In fact, no other country rewards a college degree as richly as the United States, and few other countries punish people so relentlessly for not having one. It’s a diabolical cycle: Colleges are very expensive to run, partly because of the high salaries earned by their skilled workers. But those higher salaries make college degrees extremely valuable, which means Americans will pay a lot to get them. And so colleges can charge more. As Carey, the End of College author, summarizes: “Students are over a barrel.”
Still, the return varies wildly depending on the college one attends. One in four college grads earns no more than the average high-school graduate. Associate’s degrees from for-profit universities lead to smaller salary bumps than associate’s degrees from community colleges, which are cheaper. And two-thirds of students at for-profits drop out before earning their degree anyway, meaning many will spend years struggling with debt they cannot afford to pay off — and cannot, under U.S. law, off-load through bankruptcy.
This convoluted, complicated, inconsistent system continues to exist, and continues to be so expensive because college in America is still worth the price. At certain colleges, for certain people. Especially if they finish. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and almost everywhere else, it isn’t.
Aux quatre coins de la planète, des étudiants, des universitaires, des chercheurs, mais aussi des lycéens ou des enseignants, se mobilisent pour s’opposer aux politiques néolibérales et conquérir de nouveaux droits. Et la plupart du temps, nous n’en savons rien ou si peu…
Nous nous proposons donc de tenir sur ce blog une « météo des luttes », organisée sous la forme de textes courts, de « brèves », suivis de liens à consulter ou de documents à télécharger.
Dans ce bulletin météo, nous vous signalons quelques-uns de ces combats, locaux et universels...
All over the world, students, academics, researchers, as well as high school students and teachers are mobilizing to oppose neoliberal policies and conquer new rights. But most of the time, we hear little or no wind of it...
We therefore propose to keep on this blog a “barometer of struggles” organized in the form of news in brief, followed by links to consult or documents to download.
In this weathercast, we signal to you a few of these recent fights, local and universal…
Überall auf der Welt kämpfen Studierende, Lehrende und Forschende, aber auch SchülerInnen oder gar Eltern, gegen neoliberale Politik und für neue Rechte. Davon erfahren wir in der Regel nur wenig…
Auf dieser Seite verzeichnen wir also einen wissenschaftlichen Streikwetterdienst aus kurzen Texten und Meldungen mit Links und Dokumenten zum Herunterladen.
In diesem Bericht stellen wir Euch einige dieser lokalen und allgemeinen Kämpfe vor.
En todas partes del mundo, estudiantes, académicos, investigadores, pero también estudiantes y profesores de secundaria se movilizan para oponerse a las políticas neoliberales y conquistar nuevos derechos. Pero la mayor parte del tiempo, no sabemos nada o muy poco....
Por lo tanto, proponemos mantener en este blog un "barómetro de las luchas", organizado en forma de resúmenes, seguidos de enlaces para consultar o documentos para descargar.
En este reporte meteorológico, señalamos algunas de estas luchas, locales y universales…
In tutto il mondo, studenti, accademici, ricercatori, ma anche studenti delle scuole superiori e insegnanti si stanno mobilitando per contrastare le politiche neoliberali e conquistare nuovi diritti. E il più delle volte non ne sappiamo nulla, o molto poco...
Proponiamo quindi di tenere su questo blog un "meteo delle lotte", organizzato in forma di brevi testi, seguiti da link da consultare o documenti da scaricare.
In questo bollettino meteorologico, diamo notizia di alcune lotte, locali e universali…
Em todo o mundo, estudantes, acadêmicos, pesquisadores, mas também estudantes do ensino médio e professores estão se mobilizando para se opor às políticas neoliberais e conquistar novos direitos. E, na maioria das vezes, não sabemos nada ou tão pouco acerca disso...
Propomos portanto manter neste blog um "clima das lutas", composto por textos curtos, "resumos", seguidos de links para consulta ou documentos para download.
Neste boletim meteorológico, relatamos algumas dessas batalhas, locais e universais…
Monde
La lutte mondiale des jeunes pour le climat s’intensifie
Une semaine mondiale d’action est organisée du 20 au 27 septembre 2019 avec grève scolaire mondiale le 20 septembre et grève totale le 27 septembre.
Afrique
Guinée
Plusieurs blessés étudiants et gendarmes lors des heurts à l’université de Labé, située dans la province de Hafia.
Sénégal
Un étudiant de l’université Assane Seck de Ziguinchor a été blessé par balle lors des affrontements entre la police et les étudiants le 15 juin. Ces derniers manifestent depuis plusieurs mois pour obtenir le paiement de leur bourse.
Amérique du Sud
Brazil
Nationwide Student Strike began in Brazil Over Bolsonaro’s budget cuts. Many demonstrations took place on May 15, in 15 on 17 of Brazil’s states with particularly large ones in major cities like Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and Belo Horizonte. Despite the cuts affecting only federal institutions, the protest movement has been joined by many private universities such as Rio’s Pontifical University which voted last week to join the nationwide demonstration. Em defensa da universidades públicas brasileiras, circulam petições. A de Daniel Peres, (Salvador-Bahia) dirigida em particular ao Congresso Nacional, já recolheu mais de um milhão e meio de assinaturas.
TheGuardian 30.05.2019, Tens of thousands of students, academics and teachers have taken to the streets of Brazil for their latest mass protest against what they call far-right president Jair Bolsonaro’s assault on education. Up and down the country – from Amazon cities to small towns in Brazil’s deep south – demonstrators turned out to condemn Bolsonaro’s highly controversial moves to slash funding for public education and science.
The Conversation 05.06.2019, Tens of thousands of students and professors protested nationwide on May 30 against a Jair Bolsonaro administration proposal to slash Brazil’s public education budget and starve university humanities departments of resources. It was the second mass demonstration in two weeks against the education policies of Brazil’s divisive new president. Protesters in cities and towns across Brazil took to the streets to condemn an education ministry proposal to reduce funding for Brazilian public universities by 30% during the remainder of 2019. The ministry is also considering withdrawing financing entirely from the philosophy and sociology departments of public universities. The objective would be to “focus on areas that generate immediate return to the taxpayer such as veterinary, engineering and medicine,” Bolsonaro wrote on Twitter on April 26.
Chile
En todo el país, se contesta mucho la Reforma de la Educación Superior y de Universidades Estatales llevada por el Mineduc (Ministerio de Educación). En Santiago el 6 de junio, profesores y estudiantes marchan contra el presidente Piñera que mantiene su silencio frente a las demandas. "Nos estamos manifestando por los problemas graves de la educación pública", dijo durante la marcha Mario Aguilar, presidente del Colegio de Profesores, mientras un docente grita "Chile no es una empresa y nosotros no somos los empleados de su empresa". "Avanzar hacia una educación pública, gratuita y sin deuda" es el lema bajo el cual miles de estudiantes universitarios y secundarios del país se movilizaron el 20 de junio a la llammada de la Confech (Confederación de Estudiantes de Chile).
Honduras
El Heraldo, 22.05.2019 Tegucigalpa. Este miércoles, un nutrido grupo de docentes, médicos y estudiantes del sector público llevaron a cabo desde horas de la mañana una marcha para evitar la supuesta privatización del sistema educativo y exigir la derogación de los decretos ejecutivos que le dieron vida a las comisiones especiales de transformación en las secretarías de Salud y Educación. Los maestros y docentes son apoyados en sus pretensiones por estudiantes, padres de familia y sindicatos. Las universidades, colegios y escuelas de la capital cerraron sus puertas en Tegucigalpa y muchos lugares del territorio hondureño. El caos, zozobra y vandalismo se apoderó de la capital este jueves (30 mayo). Un grupo de manifestantes protagonizó violentos enfrentamientos con policías, enfrente del Aeropuerto Internacional Toncontín, en la capital de Honduras.
Santo Domingo
Noticias SIN, 06.06.2019, Santo Domingo. Tras intentar cruzar el cerco de seguridad, la situación pasó de pacífica a disturbios. Los manifestantes lanzaban botellas de agua a los policías pero cuando comenzaron a lanzarles piedras, los agentes respondieron con bombas lacrimógenas. Las pedradas alcanzaron la cara de uno de los uniformados. La escuela de medicina de la UASD y el Colegio Médico se oponen al proyecto de ley porque aseguran que este quitará a la universidad del Estado la potestad de impartir y calificar la prueba para dejarlo en manos del sector privado.
Contre la Réforme Blanquer, les enseignants des filières professionnelles et générales poursuivent leur lutte. Certains s’organisent pour une grève des corrections ou une rétention de notes du baccalauréat. Rappelons qu’en 2019, ce sont 743 000 élèves, qui passent cet examen final remis en cause par la réforme Blanquer dès la rentrée 2020. On ne lâchera pas ! Un programme d’action bien rempli en ce mois de juin pour défendre les filières professionnelles. Les professeurs d’histoire-géographie des filières générales de l’académie de Dijon votent quant à eux pour une rétention des notes comme moyen d’action. Dans l’académie de Créteil, les professeurs de philosophie votent également pour une rétention des notes pour une durée illimitée.
L’université française en lutte contre la réforme des retraites et les politiques de précarité…
Depuis plusieurs semaines, tous les secteurs de la société française sont en ébullition contre la réforme des retraites ; fonctionnaires et salariés du privé seront touchés de plein fouet mais dans le secteur de l’Enseignement supérieur et de la recherche (ESR), épuisé par toutes les réformes néolibérales qui se succèdent depuis plus de 10 ans, le ras-le-bol est massif.
Un collectif de mobilisation pour l’emploi dans l’ESR avec des enseignants, des chercheurs, du personnel administratif et des étudiants s’organise pour dire non à la réforme des retraites et non à la loi pluriannuelle de programmation de la recherche que les députés s’apprêtent à débattre en janvier 2020.
Au-delà de la présence de longs cortèges qui défilent pendant les nombreuses manifestations interprofessionnelles organisées depuis le 5 décembre, deux actions chocs…
L’irruption de plus de 100 manifestants à une conférence dans l’un des lieux symboliques de la Start Up Nation, la Station F (https://stationf.co/fr/)
empêchant la ministre Frédérique Vidal de parler des bienfaits des partenariats avec le privé pour l’ESR et l’obligeant à être exfiltrée.
L’inauguration populaire de ce qui est supposé être un grand campus de sciences humaines et sociales en plein cœur de la banlieue la plus pauvre d’Ile de France, le campus Condorcet à Aubervilliers.
Vendredi 20 décembre, le tout nouveau campus Condorcet devait être inauguré en présence de la ministre de l’ESR, Frédérique Vidal, et de la présidente de la région Île-de-France, Valérie Pécresse (ancienne ministre de l’ESR sous Sarkozy, à qui l’on doit notamment la LRU). Mais personne dans les laboratoires, précise le tract d’invitation, n’était au courant de cette inauguration... qui n’aura pas eu lieu : organisé en catimini, l’événement a été annulé au dernier moment ! Qu’à cela ne tienne ! Inaugurons nous-mêmes les lieux dans la fête et la revendication. Pas de trêve pendant les vacances de Noël, la lutte continue et le collectif commence à préparer des états généraux de l’ESR prévus les 1er et 2 février…
L'Internationale des Savoirs pour Tous se déclare totalement solidaire de ces actions.
Aux quatre coins de la planète, des étudiants, des universitaires, des chercheurs, mais aussi des lycéens ou des enseignants, se mobilisent pour s’opposer aux politiques néolibérales et conquérir de nouveaux droits. Et la plupart du temps, nous n’en savons rien ou si peu…
Nous nous proposons donc de tenir sur ce blog une « météo des luttes », organisée sous la forme de textes courts, de « brèves », suivis de liens à consulter ou de documents à télécharger.
Dans ce bulletin météo, nous vous signalons quelques-uns de ces combats, locaux et universels...
All over the world, students, academics, researchers, as well as high school students and teachers are mobilizing to oppose neoliberal policies and conquer new rights. But most of the time, we hear little or no wind of it...
We therefore propose to keep on this blog a “barometer of struggles” organized in the form of news in brief, followed by links to consult or documents to download.
In this weathercast, we signal to you a few of these recent fights, local and universal…
Überall auf der Welt kämpfen Studierende, Lehrende und Forschende, aber auch SchülerInnen oder gar Eltern, gegen neoliberale Politik und für neue Rechte. Davon erfahren wir in der Regel nur wenig…
Auf dieser Seite verzeichnen wir also einen wissenschaftlichen Streikwetterdienst aus kurzen Texten und Meldungen mit Links und Dokumenten zum Herunterladen.
In diesem Bericht stellen wir Euch einige dieser lokalen und allgemeinen Kämpfe vor.
En todas partes del mundo, estudiantes, académicos, investigadores, pero también estudiantes y profesores de secundaria se movilizan para oponerse a las políticas neoliberales y conquistar nuevos derechos. Pero la mayor parte del tiempo, no sabemos nada o muy poco....
Por lo tanto, proponemos mantener en este blog un "barómetro de las luchas", organizado en forma de resúmenes, seguidos de enlaces para consultar o documentos para descargar.
En este reporte meteorológico, señalamos algunas de estas luchas, locales y universales…
In tutto il mondo, studenti, accademici, ricercatori, ma anche studenti delle scuole superiori e insegnanti si stanno mobilitando per contrastare le politiche neoliberali e conquistare nuovi diritti. E il più delle volte non ne sappiamo nulla, o molto poco...
Proponiamo quindi di tenere su questo blog un "meteo delle lotte", organizzato in forma di brevi testi, seguiti da link da consultare o documenti da scaricare.
In questo bollettino meteorologico, diamo notizia di alcune lotte, locali e universali…
Em todo o mundo, estudantes, acadêmicos, pesquisadores, mas também estudantes do ensino médio e professores estão se mobilizando para se opor às políticas neoliberais e conquistar novos direitos. E, na maioria das vezes, não sabemos nada ou tão pouco acerca disso...
Propomos portanto manter neste blog um "clima das lutas", composto por textos curtos, "resumos", seguidos de links para consulta ou documentos para download.
Neste boletim meteorológico, relatamos algumas dessas batalhas, locais e universais…
Amérique du Sud
Colombia
Una campaña para denunciar las amenazas de muerte contra líderes sindicalistas está en marcha como lo subraya la federación mundial de los sindicatos, Internacional de la Educación.
En efecto, en una nueva publicación de FECODE y la Escuela Nacional Sindical se registran 6.119 violaciones del derecho a la vida, la integridad física y la libertad de los y las docentes sindicalistas en Colombia entre 1986 y 2016. Entre ellas figuran 990 asesinatos, 78 desapariciones forzadas y 49 atentados contra la vida, además de más de 3.000 amenazas y más de 1.500 desplazamientos forzados.
Asie
Thailand
Pro-democracy student protesters aim for ambitious political change. Fighting for three demands (resignation of Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-ocha, changes to a constitution drafted under military rule; and, reforms to the constitutional monarchy), they won’t back down until the government agrees the three demands, says one of the more senior protest organizer.
Voranai Vanijaka, a political analyst at Bangkok’s Thammasat University, said tech-savvy youths in both territories, Hong Kong and Thailand have “shared cultural values, the love for freedom and the courage to fight for change”.
Une nouvelle étape dans la lutte contre la Loi de programmation de la recherche (LPR). Malgré le confinement, un rassemblement autorisé a réuni plus de 1200 personnes, place de la Sorbonne le 17 novembre 2020 où devait être votée en deuxième lecture la LPR. Cette loi liberticide, qui a finalement été votée, aggrave non seulement le démantèlement du statut de fonctionnaire et la précarisation du personnel et des étudiantes et étudiants, mais elle instaure aussi depuis son passage au Sénat un délit de désordre au sein de l’enceinte universitaire passible de 7 500 euros d’amende et un an d’emprisonnement.
Hongrie
"Free country, free university”, chanted thousands of students as they marched through the streets of Budapest on 23 October on the anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian revolution. They supported the 300 students who have been occupying their university of Theatre and Film Arts (SZFE in Hungarian) since the end of the summer.). SZFE’s previous senate and leadership announced their resignation on Aug. 31, saying the foundation that took over the university on Sept. 1 under a government decree had deprived them of “all essential powers”.
The students were forced to stop the blockade due to new Coronavirus restrictions on November 9 but the fight for university’s freedom and independence in the Hungary of Orban will go on.
One reason for this difference is that American college students are far more likely to live away from home. And living away from home is expensive, with or without a lazy river. Experts say that campuses in Canada and Europe tend to have fewer dormitories and dining halls than campuses in the U.S. “The bundle of services that an American university provides and what a French university provides are very different,” says David Feldman, an economist focused on education at William & Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. “Reasonable people can argue about whether American universities should have these kind of services, but the fact that we do does not mark American universities as inherently inefficient. It marks them as different.”
Plusieurs blessés étudiants et gendarmes lors des heurts à 
En todo el país, se contesta mucho la Reforma de la Educación Superior y de Universidades Estatales llevada por el Mineduc (Ministerio de Educación). 
Contre la 
On May 29, New Zealand 
Una campaña para denunciar las amenazas de muerte contra líderes sindicalistas está en marcha como lo subraya la federación mundial de los sindicatos, 
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