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Michaela Muscat
Student representative organisations are in a deep slumber as education minister Louis Galea’s reforms on the student maintenance grants have hardly elicited any response.
With most students enjoying the summer lull or vacationing abroad, few have bothered to read about the reforms on university stipends included in the pre-budgetary document, published recently by Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi.
The closing date for any proposals on the upcoming reforms due to be announced in the forthcoming budget, is the 30 September, just days before the start of the new academic year.
Anthony Camilleri, the president of the university students’ council, is of the opinion that the new reforms, which will also include the reduction of grants for students reading ‘less expensive’ degrees, is of the opinion that these are positive reforms.
“We are happy that there was no mention of loans, fees or means-testing,” the KSU’s Anthony Camilleri told MaltaToday. Loans had been first introduced by Labour in 1997 as a way of partly supplementing the Lm50 stipend.
Student cohorts are understandably sceptical, some of them privately confessing disinterest in the upcoming reforms. No wonder that the entire KSU executive committee was elected by just 200 of the 8,000 students at the University of Malta and Junior College.
In fact, the pre-budgetary plan is full of generic views and no concrete plans are mentioned, giving a broad overview of what the government is planning to implement till 2010. The section dealing with Higher Education is no exception, slightly elaborating on the report by the Higher Education Funding working committee which had been led by Bank of Valletta chairman Roderick Chalmers.
The procrastination on stipend reform comes eight years after Labour faced thousands of angry students, led by the KSU itself, who took to the streets on budget day to protest cuts in their stipends, down to a flat Lm50 a month from what had been a monthly Lm60 in the first year of study, incrementing by some Lm20 each consecutive year.
Following the Nationalists’ swift re-election in 1998, students were regaled with a Lm60 monthly stipend, a yearly Lm200 book fund, and a one-off gift of Lm400 for equipment.
The reaction today is a far cry from the countless protests of 1997. But the Nationalists’ proposed changes do not come banging rudely weeks before Budget day. Instead, this is a slow process aimed to harness in the student cohort as gently as possible and get them on government’s side.
But the reforms proposed are hardly radical. The most significant reform is a realignment of funds, signalling differentiated support for courses that require higher indirect expenditure by students. The grants of degrees not requiring such a high expenditure on gear will be deducted, assumed to include courses in the Arts, Humanities, and Communication Studies.
On a more positive note, the financial incentives of those relying on supplementary grants will be increased, such as students coming from families suffering from financial hardships, particularly single parent families.
Gozitan students crossing over from the sister island or relocating to Malta will also benefit from a special supplementary scheme.
Replete with laudatory adjectives, the budgetary blueprint makes no mention whatsoever of which courses will be granted higher grants for students, and whether more significantly whether the total average amount spent per student will remain the same.
The president of the Studenti Demokristjani Maltin, the university’s christian-democrat organisation, was equally forthcoming with plaudits, saying he was “very happy” that government had given education “so much importance… The government kept its promises to keep education as one of the main pillars,” David Herrera told MaltaToday.
Social-democrat student organisation Pulse welcomed the reforms but expressed their reservations. “There are no details and figures,” president Chris Bonnett said.
“There are courses requiring triple the grant they are allotted today, but there are also courses with barely enough grants and which will not be increased. Hopefully, these particular courses’ grants will not be reduced. What we are seeing now is the government trying to redeem the financial mismanagement it said never existed, by chipping away at our social services.”
KSU’s Anthony Camilleri also said it was important for government to improve the guidance system in schools by which students are informed of their career choices.
“Changing the grant system according to course needs was useless unless students were not informed about work possibilities and opportunities earlier in their scholastic life.”
michaelam@newsworksltd.com
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