Students call strike due to increase in university enrollment

Last Thursday, November 10, the General Assembly of University Students, a student association of the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana to which some young people from the institution are affiliated, announced that would be unemployed due to the high cost of tuition for the first semester of 2023, which increased considerably compared to 2022.

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And it is that in some careers, such as Medicine, the increase in tuition costs was up to four million pesos, which many students have considered disproportionate.

But this situation has been repeated in other institutions, such as the Universidad de los Andes, where last Friday a large group of students he staged a sit-in for the same cause. This Tuesday, November 15, demonstrations have also been organized.

Now, EL TIEMPO was able to confirm with different student platforms from private universities that meetings are being held to determine if they consider it necessary to announce a strike with in order to claim for a normalization in the costs of studies.

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This was expressed by a student leader from the Universidad del Rosario who preferred to remain anonymous until the decision to go on strike or not is made: “What is happening at Javeriana is also happening at other universities. Being in a private university does not mean that we are millionaires. The vast majority of university students are from the middle class, and this high increase in tuition is a very hard blow to the economy of young people and their families, who also often get into debt with financial institutions to study. This is making this debt much bigger for them”.

This newspaper was able to verify the non-conformity that is also experienced by students from other private institutions, not only in Bogotá but also from other regions of the country.

Thus, student platforms will continue in meetings and committees throughout the week to confirm whether or not they announce a strike. At the moment, the students of the Javeriana continue on indefinite strike, and new sit-ins are expected in Los Andes.

For their part, the universities maintain that the increases They are the product of inflation and the rise in the price of the dollar., aspects that have increased its operating costs. Likewise, as in the case of the Javeriana, they have exposed a series of financial supports, such as scholarships or forms of financing, so that their students can continue their careers.

(Keep reading: The controversy over the rise in university enrollment).

It should be made clear that in the In the case of universities, there is no cap on the annual increase in enrollmentas the Ministry of Education can establish in schools.

This is because, within the framework of their university autonomy, the institutions are free to set the increments up to the CPI value. If they are high quality accredited institutions, they can exceed this limit but they must present a report to the Ministry of National Education containing the precise justification of the factors on which the increase is based.

In this way, the Ministry can suggest caps on the increases. In this order of ideas, the Minister of Education, Alejandro Gaviria, suggested that the increase in enrollment in private higher education institutions should be done without exceeding the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which, in the month of October 2022 it stood at 12.2 percent.

“The university has to be a space where education for peace inhabits all spaces. We cannot transmit from the classrooms an example of intolerance and lack of communication“, said.

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And he added: “More than the increase, the concern that we share with the Government are the economic conditions characterized by high inflation and economic slowdown. That is why the call to Colombian universities is not to increase the price of tuition above the CPI”.

In this sense, he urged managers to make “socially responsible decisions about university enrollment.”

TIME