Petition to ask KU Leuven to stop charging increased tuition fees for non-Europeans and special programmes

[pecado]

We invite you to sign this petition: https://tiny.cc/kulfees asking KU Leuven to stop the increase of the tuition fees for non European students and special programmes.

Until recently, in KU Leuven (Louvain, Belgium) everyone was charged the same tuition fee: 922 EUR. Now in some faculties non European students should pay up to 6000 EUR. The reasons given are multiple, however it is evident that the real reason should either be that they want more money or they really dislike poor international students. This change of tuition fees puts the university at the risk of losing its international environment, for as many of the current international students have said: they would not have been able to come if they had increased the fees before. Moreover, some programmes have increased their fees for everyone, which introduces the risk that this university become like the ones in UK or USA.

This could be probably the case of many of you, that might have had the chance to go to study in Belgium, but having to pay 6000 EUR extra takes away any possibility of doing it. If that is the case, we invite you to sign and express your disapproval.

Now, I know that most here are from USA, and a very possible reaction will be to say that all that is still cheaper than in USA. However, you should understand that Europe is not the USA, Germany has completely free universities, Switzerland charges around 1300 EUR to everyone, Spain 400 EUR, etcetera. I invite you to read this document, in case you want to know with a lot of detail the context of this problem: https://www.studenten.xyz/dossier-about-the-issue-of-the-tuition-fees-in-ku-leuven-by-the-leuven-students-against-tuition-fees/

We want to invite you to sign and to express your ideas about this, not only because you are potential students, but because many of you might feel alluded by KU Leuven's authorities, who have said that they want to attract more and "better" students, and that increasing the tuition fees will do that. Supposedly some "marketing research" they did showed that the prospective student from the USA prefers an expensive university over a cheap university, and does not attend a cheap university, because he thinks that just because it is cheap it is very probably bad. We consider that this does not make any sense at all, or do you actually think like that?

We consider that whoever judges the quality of a university only by its price tag is not smart enough to be considered a "better" student, and therefore they are not achieving their objective of attracting better students. Needless to say, the idea that they want "better" international students has been felt by the international students as something quite insulting: are the current ones not good enough?

So, if you, probably a potential student from the USA, could express that this idea is senseless, that people don't like to give away money, that poor people exist in the USA too, that you do not feel more attracted just because now it is more expensive, and that they should not limite their concept of "international student" to "student from USA"... it would be very useful.

You can sign the change.org petition here: https://tiny.cc/kulfees

You can also talk and discuss with others about this issue in our facebook and twitter.

Thank you very much for your attention.

Edited May 27, 2019 by pecado