PREPARATION OUTLINE
“Tuition”
by Michal Mesko (May 6, 2004)
Specific purpose: To persuade my audience that paying tuition is essential today.
Central idea: Participation of students on expenses of their university study is the best solution for future.
INTRODUCTION
I. Introduction
A. School and school (Slovakia versus USA)
1. Look around you. Green wooden tables, hard chair, old projector for slides, cracked blackboard, sunblinds broken down… ordinary, sad state of most of our schools.
2. Close your eyes… and imagine yourself, sitting on a comfortable chair, professor giving his presentation with help of multimedia projector, computers, flip charts, quality books – everything in this very room as well as in all the others in our school…
3. Can you see the difference? Now open your eyes…
(I will show a letter with sign “$25,000”)
4. This is the difference.
B. Nowadays, big discussion spread in Slovakia about tuition at universities. Maybe I made a big thing of the example, but I guess you got the point.
C. In next few minutes, I will tell you what the current situation is, how it could be reformed and – most important – why is it important to reform the system and why students should pay tuition.
BODY
I. Current Situation at Slovak Universities
A. The school system is fusty, old fashioned, with generally low quality.
1. Education is based on memorizing theorems that often do not reflect practice.
2. Both students and professors miss motivation, initiative and creativity.
3. Thanks to that, we are wasting precious potential of young people.
B. Students are still less qualified when leaving universities.
1. Nowadays, students often only have 3 goals: credit, regular exams and final state examination.
2. Students don’t mind that they get low quality education.
3. Technical equipment is getting “out of date”, there is not enough money to buy new.
C. Constitution says: “Everybody has a right for free university education according to capabilities of citizen and society.”
1. In current situation, it is beyond our capabilities to maintain and develop the school system and without reform, it can collapse one day – and the day may come soon.
2. Already today, Slovak education is not free – it is financed from the state budget.
3. In other words, all citizens in Slovakia contribute to every single of us by about 3,000 Sk a year – also masons, clerks and others that may not have anything to do with universities.
4. In other words, nowadays everybody pays for our education; except of – us.
(Transition: As you can see, the question is not whether university school system needs more money; the question is where to get it. Frankly – do you think that our school system is good and we get everything that we could get? My answer is – no.)II. The Reform
A. Slovak university school system is not fair today and needs radical reformation.
1. Do you think it is fair that we all pay for education of people, who will flee Slovak republic at the first occasion after they graduate? Where is the profit of such person for Slovakia, which donated him/her university education?
2. After the reform, students will invest in their education; there will be more sources of financing their study and it will be fairer for everybody that profits from it – students as well as society.
B. Paradoxically, reformation will allow MORE students to study.
1. Current system of social scholarships is not good – these are low and only a little part of students get it.
2. After proposed reform, far more students will get social scholarship – up to 30% and up to 5,000 Sk per month.
3. All students will have at least three sources how to get money: higher social scholarships, talent scholarships as well as advantageous student loans.
C. Tuition should lead to increase in quality.
1. Nothing will come around all of a sudden and the reform alone will not lead to immediate shift in quality of our school system.
2. Nevertheless, paying tuition might START massive changes in our education system.
3. We will be able to get more quality teachers at our schools, to buy new equipment, to make pressure on quality – we will be able not only to survive, but we will be able to develop.
4. There will be greater competitiveness among students since they will be motivated by scholarships based on the grades – and so will quality of students increase. (However, it is up to us.)
5. When people pay money, they behave other way than they do when they get something free and take it for granted.
6. We would make schools better for ourselves and our children.
D. What would a yearly tuition of 10,000 Sk at our faculty mean?
1. 150 data projectors
2. 250 new PCs
3. 17,000 new text-books
4. Scholarships of 2,500,000 Sk (full tuition for the best 25% of students)
(Transition: Well, but why should we pay tuition?)III. Why should we pay tuition?
A. Money is a big motivator.
1. If you attend course in private language school, you pay for it (commonly up to 10-15,000 Sk per year); you demand certain quality and you try harder yourself as well.
2. In long-term, we will have more quality pedagogues.
3. Scholarships for grades will motivate students to “earn” for their study.
B. Education has its value, costs, so it should also have the price.
1. Nobody has to pay “cash”; everybody will have right to get a student loan up to the height of tuition.
2. If you get a student loan, after 5 years of study, you might have a debt of about 60,000 Sk – an amount that you might earn in 2 or 3 months as a graduate of our faculty.
3. State will pay the debt for students that will get employed in public sector.
C. Education will became “service”, and we will be “customers”.
CONCLUSION
I. Conclusion
A. “Everybody would like to know; but nobody likes to pay for it.” – Ancient Romans.
B. I am not saying that planned reform of Slovak university education system is the best it could be; rather than this, I wanted to explain you why paying tuition in general is the best solution for the future and for us.
C. I made a list of top 20 American universities.
1. At 18 of them, yearly tuition and fee is more than $25,000, or 800,000 Sk.
2. In USA, parents save money for their children’s education from their birth, because they know it’s worth paying – and you should do the same for your children.
3. Don’t we want prestigious universities and high-quality education in Slovakia, too?
D. We are those who will profit from the education we get the most through all our lives; therefore we should participate on financing it. We will also have right – and we should – demand service at certain quality level. Everything will be up to us.
E. The time has come and we have to consider university education as an investment – investment into us and into our future.
Elvíra
Štvrtok, 21. novembra 2024
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