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Proposed by: DSF, VSS-UNES-USU, fzs Adopted at: Board Meeting 57, November 2009 The current state of educational systems and the situation of students in many European countries is no longer acceptable!
More and more governments are withdrawing from their public responsibility in higher education by decreasing public funding. This has major effects on the quality of the public higher education system and on the equal access and completion condition.
In many countries student support systems are not sufficient enough to provide equal opportunities for everyone to study regardless their socio-economic background. The ongoing reforms in Austria, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland are increasing the financial and therefore social barriers to graduation.
Whereas in a context of financial and economic crisis, governments should invest into education as a major provider of both professional protection and individual emancipation – several European countries are facing major budget cuts and privatization of higher education.
By massive protests and occupying universities students express their strong will of making their governments fail in their projects.
ESU strongly supports those students for their right to free education of high quality! Therefore ESU is supporting the students demands for governments to abandon their plans and respond to the students needs to remove access barriers to and within the educational system.
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