Four philosophy students sit in a smoky café near náměstí Jana Palacha, drinking beer and talking at leisure about the lecture they're skipping, as they idle away the afternoon. But when discussion turns to university tuition, the group becomes animated.

 

"I always say, if you get in, you shouldn't have to pay," says Ondřej Vocilka, 20. "Who could afford to pay while studying? University education shouldn't be just for the top few percent."

 

Unfortunately, say a growing number of students who can't get in to state universities, that's just what it is.

 

"You and your leftist ideas," says 22-year-old Štěpán Kovařík. "Students should pay. Definitely. It would help raise the quality."

 

Czech state universities are free, or at least for those who can pass their rigid entrance exams, and have been for as long as anyone can remember. They're also severely cash-strapped and overcrowded.

 

As the elections approach, parties across the political spectrum are trying to outdo each other in promising remedies for the ailing state university system.

 

The right-of-center Civic Democrats (ODS) propose introducing tuition, as do the Christian Democrats (KDU-ČSL). The ruling Social Democrats (ČSSD) are against tuition in any form. They, like the Green Party, promise to pump more state resources into universities. And all parties, with the exception of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, promise to increase the number of state university spots.

 

The Czech Republic has one of the lowest percentages of university-educated people in Europe. According to Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) statistics, only a third of people who could be attending university here are. The OECD average is over 40 percent.

 

"It's horrible," says Petr Matějů, director of the sociology of education and stratification department at the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. "We are so behind other countries."

 

In 2003, the latest year for which statistics are available, 11 percent of Czechs between ages 45 and 54 had attained university level education. The combined European and North American average for the same age group was nearly double at 21 percent.

 

According to Matějů, by charging tuition, universities could open their doors to more students without sacrificing quality.

 

A growing number of people here want a university education, but there simply isn't enough room and resources. More than 70,000 students will be accepted into state universities here this year, but the number of applications is nearly double. Many of those rejected are qualified.

 

Štěpán Pinkava, a 23-year-old Czech-Swede, who came here after studying economics at Lund University in Sweden, says tuition might not be such a bad idea. "I would be willing to pay some sort of tuition if it would mean more people could get in and the facilities would improve," he says, noting the shabby state of the lecture halls here. Pinkava applied to Charles University's medical program last year but didn't get in. This year, like many others in the queue, he will try again.

 

 

Many Czech students spend years trying to get into the program they want. A lot end up studying something they're not interested in just for the sake of a university education.

 

But not everyone thinks letting more people in should be the Education Ministry's biggest concern. Vladimír Haasz, chairman of the Council of Universities, says the priority right now shouldn't be increasing the number of university spots but rather spending more on improving the schools' quality.

 

"Some fields will always be more popular than others," he adds. "So those programs will always end up turning away a lot of people."

 

Haasz acknowledges that tuition could help improve things by motivating students to demand better quality. He notes, however, that any form of tuition would need to be accompanied by a system of loans and grants.

 

Tuition would also force students to think about education more as an investment, says Matějů.

 

Michal Stehlík, dean of the Philosophical Faculty at Charles University, agrees. He says the way people perceive higher education here needs to change. "Right now universities often function as a sort of social service," he says.

 

According to Matějů, this is the result of the country's tradition of free university education. People here consider higher education as a right rather than as an investment they make for their future.

 

This is why the question of tuition is so contentious. The ČSSD has pledged not to introduce tuition in any form, well aware that to do so would raise an uproar among students nationwide.

 

 

Czechs, of course, are hardly alone in wanting to preserve free higher education. Scandinavian countries don't charge their students to study, nor do Germany and Austria, all places with respected, even prestigious, education systems.

 

But the European academic world seems to be leaning away from these traditions as more governments consider tuition-based systems.

 

Germany's constitutional court struck down a bill last year to clear the way for introducing tuition, while Slovakia is all but ready to launch it.

 

 

Matejů certainly thinks so. Calling the current system unsustainable, he argues that should tuition be introduced, government spending would have to increase drastically to bring about real improvements.

 

Education Ministry officials point out that they have been steadily increasing financial resources, with this year's budget for university education at 19.1 billion Kč ($811.23 million). That's a 2.3 billion Kč increase from 2005.

 

But Matějů maintains that universities need at least 30 billion Kč.

 

Ondřej Gabriel, a spokesman for the Education Ministry, says the state is diverting some of its financial resources toward increasing capacity at universities. "The government wants the number of first-year university students to reach 80,000 to 90,000," he says.

 

Money for state universities, however, should go into increasing quality by supporting research programs in the next few years, says Gabriel.

 

But the government continues to spend less than most countries on higher education, as OECD figures for 2005 show. This country spends on average $5,555 (130,543 Kč) annually per university student, about half the typical spending in OECD nations. Compare that to $22,234 in the United States, where university students pay tuition. Even a small, post-communist country like Hungary spends more annually on higher education: $7,122 per student.

 

 

"The university system here still has a long way to go," he says.