What Price Education?

University students staged a sit-in at Berlin's historic City Hall last week, blasting whistles and shouting slogans and holding out until they were dragged away by police. In London, students protested in Parliament Square. And for weeks now in Paris, thousands of striking students have filled the boulevards, marching with signs and banners and chanting "all together!" Europeans are used to seeing students on the streets pushing for radical change, but these young people want to preserve the status quo.

They're protesting government plans to reform their higher-education system — plans that in some cases place a greater share of the financial burden on students.

European universities desperately need more money in order to compete with the United States, which spends over 2% of its GDP — more than any other developed country — on higher education. Many of Europe's universities are run down, with overcrowded classrooms and a lack of such basic equipment as science laboratories and computers. American universities are also better at turning out students with a master's degree in six years, while in Europe it can take almost a decade.

Governments realize that universities need more funds — but also know they can't provide them from budgets already overburdened by shrinking tax revenues and rising costs for health care, unemployment benefits and pensions. So politicians are looking at tuition fees to increase university funding; students see the specter of creeping privatization that could, they argue, make higher education unaffordable.