Friday, March 7, 2008

Quality of Czech Journalism

I prefer not to comment on most cases of mistakes Czech Journalist make, mostly because there is too many of them. In this case, I have to make an exception.
Background: Czech Ministry of Education is preparing so called "White Book" of tertiary education (i.e, universities, colleges...) Part of the proposal is deferred tuition, which is generally a great idea: every student can study for free, accumulates the debt that he has to repay only when his income is bigger than a threshold (e.g, 1.5x average wage). If he never exceeds that, (s)he studied for free. He can always pay in advance (and save) or he can repay faster. The idea is better than regular tuition for risk averse population (probably very usual in EU), because if you get sick and can't repay, no big deal (plus you get a free health care anyway).
The White Book proposes general mechanisms of this idea. I was somewhat involved (yet prefer not to discuss the details) in preparing it and it was pretty intensive for a short period of time. I re-read it about 6 times during 5 days or so. As I said, the idea is still rather general, so there are no specific numbers, interest rates, thresholds etc. proposed, just "almost random" examples are given.
It's kind of surprising to read then that the limit on the tuition is fixed to at most 30 000CZK (per year, about $1600). Well, I guess the journalists know more than the authors (and their teams). I hope if they knew the truth and bothered to report it.

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