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  3. Madrid—It was no mistake that university campuses proliferated during Spain’

Madrid—It was no mistake that university campuses proliferated during Spain’

游客2023-12-15  25
问题     Madrid—It was no mistake that university campuses proliferated during Spain’s decade-long, construction-led boom years. Education and health care have long been two of the most prized—and seemingly sacred—parts of the European social model favored by Spain. Even as the economic crisis has spread through Europe, Spaniards had shielded social spending in those areas from the consequences.
    But now, with the government struggling to clean up public finances, education and health care spending have moved front and center of the battle over what, after all the austerity measures are put in place, will be left of the vaunted welfare state many Spaniards have also come to associate with European Union membership.
    On Tuesday, Spanish teachers went on strike in cities across the country by the thousands, seeking to defend the education sector against a package of spending cuts—￠10 billion, or $12.7 billion—approved last week by Parliament as part of the government’s plan to meet its more stringent budget targets.
    The strike was the first ever coordinated by Spain’s five main teachers’ unions, across the whole of the state education sector, from nursery school to university. While the unions claimed that 80 percent joined the strike, the government put the level at 19.4 percent.
    Students held protests as well in Spain’s main cities, with a group of them also briefly blocking two highways around Barcelona during the morning rush hour. In Seville, students plan to occupy the city’s historic university building for several days to protest against the spending cuts.
    "Education is absolutely the last thing that should get squeezed because it’s absurd to try to make amends for the spending mistakes of the past by jeopardizing the prospects of the next generation," said Ignacio Valero, an economics professor at the Complutense University, who stayed away from work and planned to join thousands of others on a protest march in central Madrid late Tuesday afternoon.
    For its part, the government insists that its education overhaul is not just a cost-cutting exercise but also an attempt to raise efficiency and quality. Regional governments oversee both education and health spending, and during the construction boom several new university campuses were often among their flagship projects.
    As a result, Spain has 79 universities, spread across 236 campuses and offering 2,413 different undergraduate degrees as well as 2,758 masters’ degrees. Jose Ignacio Wert, Spain’s education minister, recently compared unfavorably such statistics with those of California, which has about 10 million fewer inhabitants and by his count only 10 universities.
    "The problem of our education system is not fundamentally a problem of resources," Mr. Wert told a parliamentary committee. "We are facing a situation of stagnation, if not regression in our education system, to which we must respond."
    To back his arguments, Mr. Wert also noted that despite its huge spending on university infrastructure, Spain does not have a single university among the world’s top 150, according to the Shanghai ranking of world universities. Instead, the university dropout rate in Spain is 30 percent—compared with the European average of 16 percent—which he estimated to represent a lost investment in human capital worth ￠2.96 billion a year.
    In April, Mr. Wert set up a committee of independent advisers to help raise university standards. Yet he has also lambasted "the complete lack of flexibility" of Spanish students, even in the midst of another recession that has pushed youth unemployment above 50 percent. Only 7 percent of Spanish students move out of their home region to pursue university studies, compared with 68 percent in the United States and 52 percent in Britain.
    Teachers were also protesting against the government’s plan to extend their working hours and fill more classrooms, with schools encouraged to raise the number of pupils per class by 20 percent in the coming academic year in order to lower running costs.
    State universities will be allowed to raise fees by as much as 66 percent, a move that some education specialists are warning will shut out young people who have recently chosen to extend their studies rather than join the unemployment lines.
    "If young people cannot afford to study anymore, what else are they meant to be doing while this crisis drags on and makes it impossible for them to find work?" said Maria Angeles Marquez, 55, a civil servant in the national Education Ministry who said she fully supported the latest protests.
                                                    From The Times, May 22, 2012 [br] Why did Mr. Wert set up a committee of independent advisers in April?
选项 A、To improve teachers’ teaching ability.
B、To help students with their study.
C、To help raise university standards.
D、To improve employment rate.
答案 C
解析 本题为细节题。第十一段第一句In April，Mr．Wert set up a committee of independent advisers to help raise university standards．由此可以得出答案为C。
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