May 18, 2008

To better and more open universities - through reduction of funding? Alias a special Czech way of tertiary education improvement.

The plans for financing the tertiary educational sector revealed last week by the Czech government indicate that Czech universities would experience a real decrease of teaching funding per student. This announcement came shortly after presenting the White Paper for Higher Education: with the aim to make tertiary education accessible and open to broad masses of students. Already between 1995 and 2004, the per capita funding decreased by one third, the biggest slump among the OECD countries. At the same time, more money was promised to private universities, making the Czech Republic one of the few European countries providing such support. The government and its main party, ODS (Civic Democratic Party), apparently do not see any contradiction between the White Paper goals and their financing needs. And so ODS could proudly launch one of the pillars for their regional election campaign last week: promoting and opening education for everybody.

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