Parliament votes in favor of freezing university tuition fees

The Catalan parliament has approved limiting public university tuition fees and modifying the higher education law to avoid future price increases. The chamber has greenlighted a popular legislative initiative backed by more than 62,000 students. 

Students wanted the Catalan government’s 2020 executive order to become a law to limit any possible tuition hikes in the future. 

The greenlighted legislation includes two new amendments. The first one will set the cost of an ECTS credit at a maximum price of €17.69. The second amendment will see the cost of public master’s degrees decrease by up to 70% in the next three years. 

The legislation obliges that all public university tuition fees will have a maximum price, which has been set at the current lowest cost. 

The bill has been approved with the votes from government political parties: Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC), senior coalition partner, and Junts per Catalunya (JxCat), junior partner. But also with conservatives People’s Party, far-right VOX, and the far-left CUP force. Members from the Socialists, anti-austerity Podemos, and Ciudadanos parties have abstained. 

"This is the first step to returning students' right to education. It’s the first step to guaranteeing a public university that is a place for knowledge, social integration, and cohesion. This is the first step to guarantee education as a common universal right," Anna Rosselló, students’ spokesperson, said to the Catalan parliament. 

The far-left pro-independence CUP party introduced another amendment that did not pass. The force wanted to get rid of the "punishment" students face when they have to pay more money to repeat a course. 

Students have been pushing to lower university tuition fees since 2012. At the time, the government led by Artur Mas, from the Catalan centrist-right party, Convergència i Unió, pushed for budget cuts rising university fees by 66%. Since then, pupils have organized dozens of demonstrations to revoke the measure.