Proposed by : LSA (Latvia)

Adopted at: Board Meeting 56 

In the middle of December 2008, the Latvian government in an overnight session altered the Budget and some laws, thus enabling itself to alter almost any dimension of life in Latvia to any extent during the following year. After that, the higher education sector was hit hard: approx. 35% of the original funding for suddenly became unavailable to Higher Education institutions.

Currently the Latvian government is planning to take away 40% of the remaining funds, which would leave higher education with only 38 to 43 percent of the funding originally budgeted. The planned cuts will affect students on a large scale, with a mostly negative impact on student loans, government grants, housing, the public funding of education and study courses.

This will reduce the quality of higher education, as plans to cope with such a huge decrease in funding, include closing down study programs and courses. There have already been cases of this happening in Latvia.
All of this will seriously limit access to higher education and hinder the economic, social and intellectual development of Latvia.

ESU strongly believes that properly funded higher education is the key to the economic, social and intellectual development of any country, including Latvia.

Unlike most European countries that understand the importance of education and invest in it by increasing (or at least not reducing) funding, Latvia has chosen a path of complete social, intellectual and – in the long term – economical annihilation by cutting funds for education and instead allocating the money to short-term needs.

Seeing all this, ESU requires immediate action and strongly calls for the Latvian government to:

Restore proper funding to higher education;
Support students in their struggle for qualitative education by creating the required setting for restoring the cancelled courses and study paths;
Keep the availability of higher education at the previous level;

ESU supports the struggle of LSA to achieve these milestones and calls its members to take active part in the student demonstration of the 5th of May in Latvia.