LONDON – ESU’s project on ‘Financing the Students’ Future’ (FinSt) – a hot topic in the world of higher education - is moving ahead rapidly. Members of the Project Team and Research Team met in London for the second Management Meeting of the project on 8-9 August. Although a lot of work still needs to be done, progress has been made on a number of aspects of the project and its outcomes.
First of all, from September 2011 to February 2012, a series of student representatives exchanges will take place. Aim of the exchanges is to share knowledge and practices on Higher Education (HE) financing, the HE landscape and on how the students are involved in financing debates across different ESU members. Student representatives across the ESU membership have the opportunity to apply to either the UK (NUS UK), Austria (ÖH) or Estonia (EUL). Each of these three national unions is organising exchanges for six representatives, resulting in a total of 18 places.
Austria and Estonia next in line
The call and selection process is now complete for the first two exchange periods that will be hosted by NUS UK in the last two weeks of September 2011. Calls for the exchanges in Austria (ÖH) and Estonia (EUL) are in the pipelines and will be launched in due course, so make sure to keep an eye out for it. The exchanges in Austria will take place in November - December. Estonia will welcome the representatives during January and February 2012.
Although each of the three host national unions will design their own programme, the exchanges are likely to include visits to local students’ unions, policy tutorials and debates, focus groups, dissemination activities and many more activities with a view to gauging the perceptions and attitudes of the visiting representatives towards the system in the host nation.
Five articles
Now that the surveys have been completed by the national unions and the project has received feedback on the mapping of HE and student financing systems, the Research Team members are working on the analysis of the results. This will lead to a series of five articles and a desk research report, the bulk of which will be completed in the coming months. Much of the work from the data analysis will feed into the Consultations Seminar in Liverpool and will be available to ESU members for information and/or comments and input.
Consultations Seminar
The Consultations Seminar will take place from 24 November to 27 November in Liverpool, UK. Currently the agenda is being finalised and the venue has been confirmed, with NUS UK eagerly looking forward to welcoming ESU members and others to Liverpool. The event will bring together members from ESU as well as other stakeholders across the HE sector to share knowledge and exchange opinions on HE financing.
By George-Konstantinos Charonis
Article from: http://www.esu-online.org/news/article/6001/521/
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