Members of parliament for the governing coalition Mojmir Mamojka (SMER-SD) and Katarina Tothova of the People's Party-Movement for a Democratic Slovakia (LS-HZDS) criticized the draft amendment to the University Act prepared by the Education Ministry. Jan Mikolaj from the Slovak National Party (SNS) heads the department.
During a meeting of the parliamentary constitutional and legislative committee on Tuesday the two coalition deputies stood by the side of the opposition that does not like the draft at all. Also Jaroslav Paska of the SNS joined their critique. Christian-Democrat Daniel Lipsic said that the amendment does not solve the problem of collecting hidden tuition fees from external university students via various civic associations or foundations. "We only are fooling ourselves that we are going to solve something," he said. He does not like it that the government wants to pay subsidies to universities for external students only if these decide not to collect tuition fees from part-time students. According to him universities will continue collecting fees from students through third parties.
Ms. Tothova insists that tuition fees collection should be set as a duty in the amendment. Moreover, she sees as a problem that students will lose motivation to protest against paying to a third entity. Mr. Mamojka thinks that the draft is aimed against universities because these are about freedom and "it's going down the drain there". He compared the amendment to a seriously ill patient. He asked whether the amendment is here only because university rectors ordered it.
Education Ministry State Secretary Jozef Habanik, however, defended the amendment. He said that it enables the ministry to penalize schools for the currently common practice to collect tuition fees via third entities.
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