As of today 47 days have passed since the University of Puerto Rico went on strike. it’s already June and no end seems in sight some of the demands the students have are reasonable (I will post them on a bit) anyway this strike it’s just getting out of hand and IMO handled horribly by both the students and the college administration. It’s still ridiculous this has gone so long with so many students not being able to graduate, finish the semester etc.So what are the students demanding?
1:Warranty that credits won’t be raised in price:we pay 45 dollars per credit, the administration want’s to raise it to 100, I think this demand is partly ok because we are currently facing economic crisis so this was expected, what bothers me is the drastic amount they want to raise it for in the span of the summer, I would be fine with a steady increase but this is a bit much
2:Warranty that none of the 8 district public collages would be sold or privatized:This one I don’t get that well, this was a rumor at best, I guess it goes to show that here in PR Privatized is a huge big boogeyman I just think that the students are making waves over nothing
3:To see ALL of the accounts for the college:just at it’s written students want to know were the money is going,though I don’t know how much difference does it make if they can’t do anything about it, the best I can hope for it’s that a federal investigation starts once all this is over.
4:Warranty that no student will be punished: the college has already sued quite a few of the organizers of this strike and I can’t blame them in part since in previous strikes there has been people taking advantage of the situation and sabotaging research labs and other places.
I write this to get it off my chest and to see what you all think about this, it has gone way out of hand and there are rumors going around that between today and tomorrow the students that are holed up in the colleges will be forcebly removed from the premises by a private security company who are called experts in employee/management problems.Many different situations have happened in these 47 days, police and students had a like 2 fights, police had surrounded the main district college for most of these pas weeks, they did a Seige as in literaly a seige not allowing food or water for the students, 3 different public messages one by the UPR president, the other by the organizers of the strikes and the other by students against the strike.
As another Puerto Rico resident I’ve been watching all of this happen too, though I was not as well informed of the facts as Mastermune (I didn’t know there had been incidents of sabotage, for example). I think the real problem was that the heads of the university pretty much said “shut up and take it” to the students, assuming this was going to last just a few days and then die out. Bad idea- it just pissed them to the point where, for the first time ever I believe, all of the student councils in all the campuses voted for an unlimited strike- THAT’S when the sh*t hit the fan. Now I don’t know who to side with, the students may be going too far by preventing access to the colleges but the administration is now painting the students as just unreasonable when they could have handled this better from the start. I just hope this gets resolved in a peaceful manner (we’ve already had some violence, nothing tragic Thank Goodness); I’ve got nephews of College-age who are being affected by all this too.
(I didn’t know there had been incidents of sabotage, for example)
Right now I don’t know if in this strike there has been a sabotage, What I do know is that it has happened before, on similar strikes thanks to the information given to me from one of my friends who works at one of the research labs.Two things can be said about this is
1:The strike could have been over if it weren’t for the administration saying we will accept your demands,but never guaranteeing any of it
2:People who are not students taking advantage of the situation just so they can stick it to the goverment: PR has it share of political problems that have been boiling for a few months and this strike happens and well people say this is a good chance as any to express our discomfort with it.
I paid $1,500 per credit hour for the last three years. An undergraduate Puerto Rican university obviously can’t charge those rates, but I am honestly curious how it gets by on $45 per credit. Do goods and services cost 1/30 as much in Puerto Rico as New York, or even 1/10? Suddenly a Puerto Rican vacation sounds like a great idea.
Xwing, tuition rates aren’t always a good indicator of general prices, especially since tertiary education is often supported by the state (in UPR’s case, too).
What I’d like to know is how the university justifies a 122% hike in tuition. Supposing this isn’t just the admin taking advantage of the students, it is an indirect admission that their past economic model was way non-viable. Asking for the U’s accounts in face of such a sudden difference in rates seems very rational to me.
You also went to a private law school. As Rig said, public universities obviously get subsidies. A better comparison may be when you went to Michigan (you went to Michigan, right? I seem to recall you talking about Ann Arbor).
I dunno what UGA cost me for undergrad (HOPE Scholarship, free undergrad, God bless Zell Miller and the lottery). A semester at UGA for an in-state student costs $4368 for the upcoming academic year. A full time student is enrolled in 12 to 17 credit hours, typically averaging 15. At 15, that’s $291.20 per credit hour. About 6.5x the old Puerto Rico cost, 3x the new cost. So yeah, $45 still seems quite low. Then again, their facilities may not have been the best around, and like you said, services may just cost a lot less.
Still, $291.20 per credit hour is a lot closer to the $45/$100 figures than $1500.
Michigan’s in-state tuition is only $400 per credit, because out-of-state students subsidize in-state students by paying $1.3k per credit. Living in Ann Arbor is cheap. My single apartment was about $400 per month. If a Puerto Rican university can get by on $45 per credit, the cost of goods and services must be unbelievably low. The (federal? territorial?) government must also contribute huge sums, because there are proportionately less out-of-“state” students in Puerto Rico, and they are not subsidizing the university with $1.3k per credit. No matter how you parse it, $45 seems very low.
I can tell you that the college is cheap no doubt about that,as far as I know we get help from the federal goverment and local ones,also we get funding for reasearch from a bunch of different companies, but to tell you the truth I don’t know how exactly it keeps being so cheap,I know raising the price is inevitable the cost of services and good may be slightly cheaper here than most states but not by much heck the drastic increase in prices is making our disemployment higher thanks to a bunch of companies leaving the island to get cheaper labor elsewhere.
What exactly are the students doing?
At the beggining they barred themselfs inside the colleges, not allowing anyone to enter exept a few people, and they still are doing this,they made their own Student Negotiation Group to try and get a deal that benefits the students 100% of the way even if I don’t know what their proposals say(for me this feels more like a hostage situation with the students demanding ransom more than a negotiation since it’s all we want what we want or nobody graduates or studies) anyways right now the last things that have happened are:
1:Students are worried that the police might forcebly removed
2:Yesterday the administration sat down for 30 minutes in the negotiation table sat up practically said fuck it and left,with two people waiting outside the building waiting for some students to give them the suing papers,fortunetly negotiations should resume tomorrow
3:The governor of PR tried to give a mediator for the situation students refused, he tried sending a form to all students to vote if they wanted to keep going or not,in complete secrecy and the student counsel said something like it undermines their efforts for freedom of speech or some bullshit like that
that last point brings me to a question I have,How do you vote in a student assembly in your colleges? here we get together and they give us two pieces of paper of different colors and we raise one in approval or disapproval.
PS:If some things sound strange or don’t make sense please forgive me since I am paraphrasing a lot of the information and while english is my first language it’s sometimes hard for me to translate a lot of the terms they use here in all this mess.
If you need help with translations just send me your posts first and I’ll fix them, Mune. It’s what I do for a living after all. (No I won’t charge you.)
One thing that baffles me is that I’ve talked to some college students (including my nephews) and they talk as if everything were already solved, that there’s an agreement to use the first two weeks of August to catch up on the last semester and then start the new one. But that’s not what I see on the news, like Mune said it just sounds like nobody really wants to give in, and the ads asking for the end of the strike on TV sound quite pathetic. I suspect the students are just trusting what the councils tells them but that there’s no true deal yet. It might also be rumors and wishful thinking.
that there’s an agreement to use the first two weeks of August to catch up on the last semester and then start the new one.
What you say it’s true a letter was send to tell the students that just as you said we finish the semester in august and start the new one right away, at least in mayaguez I do not know about the other towns.But what REALLY got’s me worried is that I was awaiting my Readmission papers,but thanks to the strike that’s pretty much gone out the window because without that paper no scholarship for me and that sucks really hard.
(No I won’t charge you.) 