LÍS: Icelandic students fight for improved support and receive Greenlandic and Faroese friends

The National Union of Students in Iceland (LÍS), launched the campaign “Students are not allowed to have it better” on January 21st to fight for improvements on the Icelandic Student Loan Fund.

The goal of this campaign is to get through changes to the allocation rules of the fund for increased basic support and to raise the earnings threshold. The estimated basic support of students is far below the support and wage of other social groups and has not been increased in correlation with added need in the past several years. The earnings threshold -the income which students are allowed to earn before their loans are cut- has not been raised since 2014 while wages have risen by 43% and is the lowest in the Nordics and less than half of what it is in Norway and Denmark. Further information about the campaign can be found here.

In addition to the campaign, LÍS has joined hands in a cooperation named NAIS (The North-Atlantic Islands’ Student cooperation) together with MFS (The National Union of Faroese Students, Ili ili (The National Union for Students in Greenland) and Avalak (Greenlandic Student Organisation in Denmark). LÍS will host a convention in Reykjavík on Quality Assurance called “Let’s talk about Quality” on January 24th-28th.

Quality Assurance in Higher Education in Iceland has grown rapidly since the foundation of LÍS in 2013. Through presentations and workshops over the weekend, the National Unions in Greenland and the Faroe Islands will be able to push for improvement within Higher Education in their National context as well as develop their own work within Quality Assurance.