TURKEY-EDUCATION: Protests Underline Crisis of Affordability

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nadire Mater

ISTANBUL, Mar 5 1996 (IPS) - Turkey is being rocked by student protests over increased fees highlighting a crisis in public education.

Some 2,500 students occupied the campus of Istanbul university last Friday. After 45 of their number were arrested during clashes with police, student leaders vowed to broaden the struggle for more affordable education.

Evidence of that came Monday when hundreds of students marched through this city demanding the detainees’ release.

And at Hacettepe University in the capital, Ankara, hundreds of students took control of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences after the administration expelled 11 students who refused to pay increased fees.

Also on Monday, on another campus, Northern Zonguldak, 25 students were temporarily expelled for their involvement in boycotts. Student action spread to the west port city of Izmir and Edirne in the northwest.

Reports say during clashes with the police in Istanbul, many students were badly beaten. Some were detained and kept in police custody.

A recent decision by Istanbul University to expel 16 students for refusing to pay increased fees was trigger for the protest.

In Ankara and Istanbul, students complying with appeals from student associations at the start of the new semester, refused to pay fees imposed by the Higher Education Administration. Barred from taking the finals in accordance with Turkish university regulations, they were finally dismissed.

Students claim payment of fees for public education is against the law. They say fee collection has become increasingly a tributary — a pun on words “harac”–tribute– and “harc”– fee.

“This year fees are increased to 8 million Turkish Lira (USD 123) from that of 3.8 million in 1995,” complains Kubra Ozdemir, a law student at Istanbul University.

She supports the protest action but has paid the fee.

“I do not want to risk my rights for the finals. (But) it is getting harder and harder for the low income to go to the university. It requires at least monthly USD 300 in order to continue university training, whereas the state support is a meager USD 10 per month.”

Turkish students receive a certain amount of public assistance during their university years. However, money is short: allotments hardly meet the needs of the nearly one million students in the country’s 50 universities and colleges.

“Providing education for citizens is one of the essential tasks of the state,” says Hatice Kurtulus, of the Faculty of Economics at Istanbul University. “Fees are in fact illegally charged.”

In 1993, 10 percent of the budget was allotted to the Ministry of Education. Eighty percent of the 4.25 billion U.S dollar education budget was used for current spending, leaving almost nothing to subsidise students and for new investments.

Under the constitution, education is supposed to be free. But there is a crisis. Demand for graduates is higher than the learning institutions can produce.

In addition to the low quality of training offered in public high schools, bitter competition for university places has compelled families to pour thousands of dollars into private preparatory courses during their children’s high school years.

Yet only 20 percent of the one million graduates who leave High Schools each year find a channel into higher education. The remaining 800,000 are eliminated through entrance examinations.

Some critics charge that the government wants to privatise education – in the same way other areas of the public sector are being sold to private interests.

“The increase in fees amounts to expelling the poor from universities,” says Hakan Bakkal of Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul.

Gulnur Ofur, a student of medicine from Istanbul University, says universities “are imbued with all sorts of problems from lack of freedom for free discussion to police surveillance. Even if the fee issue was resolved, basic problems would remain as they were unless profound reforms were not introduced.”

“The staff in the faculty of medicine instead of increasing the level of education are busy seeking profits from clinic therapy,” says Ofur. “Whereas most of those total 50 universities are short of academic staff. There is no way out but a total restructuring of higher education.”

Istanbul University rector Bulent Berkarda says of the protesting students: “These are bandits. They have ruined the university for the dismissal of 16 people. If they had applied I would personally pay their fees. They are not innocent students, they are the members of the left-wing fractions.”

“We are not innocent,” replies law student Anit Baba who led the occupation. “They are not either.”

Baba recalls that he was himselfy expelled from the university in the previous semester fro he was unable to the fee. “We are striving not only for education free of charge, but also for democracy, freedom of thought and for the rights of the poor for education,” he told IPS.