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For a whole week, Lebanese university students demonstrated rejecting the decisions issued by most universities and forcing students to pay fees in dollars or pounds at the exchange rate of 3,900, at a time when each dollar is equal to 1,515 Lebanese pounds, according to the official rate set by the Bank of Lebanon, amid the continuation of the escalating crisis and the dollar exchange rate on the black market reached 8,900 Lebanese pounds.
The American University of Beirut made the decision to increase its tuition fees by adopting the price of 3,900 Lebanese pounds per dollar, after the Jesuit University announced the modification of the current exchange rate to charge premiums, which paved the way for other Private universities in Lebanon followed the same approach, the last of which was the Arab University of Beirut and the University. Antonine.
It should be noted that there is a public university in Lebanon, which is the Lebanese University, whose headquarters are distributed in all governorates, and that it has not yet announced the start date of the academic year, and the opening of registration doors, under the pretext of the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic in the country, noting that he carried out the summer exams as usual and without regard. Sanitary measures, according to students.
The Beirut Medical Union says in a statement that “the number of doctors who have left Lebanon since the beginning of the economic crisis has reached 400 doctors. The number is not exact due to several considerations, the most important of which it is the inability of the association to count doctors who have gone to countries that do not require equivalencies or entrance exams, such as the Gulf states, for example. And countries in Eastern Europe and other regions. ”
In turn, the vice president of the student council of the Lebanese American University of Beirut, Lynn El Haraka, in an interview with Al-Hurra, expressed her concern and her fellow students about the continuous high exchange rate and the impossibility of guaranteeing the possibility to continue their studies, noting that many students are unable to join the class. Scholastic for this reason.
The movement explained that “if the student pays 15 million pounds for a semester, he must pay 39 million pounds.”
Hazem al-Maghribi, one of the organizers of the protest movements, said in an interview with Al-Hurra that, “in light of the inability of the Lebanese University to resist the exodus of students from private universities, a unified student front that includes everyone from all provinces to pressure the interested authorities to revoke their decisions. ” .
In her interview with Al-Hurra, the researcher and university professor, Nai Al-Raei, highlighted that “Lebanon’s main universities receive a lot of international support and assistance, and have surplus funds whose time has come to use them and not depend on the student earnings, “noting that” educational institutions Education has become a commodity that can be obtained with money, rather than a message to build the nation.
Al-Raei warned of the danger of preventing some students from finishing their semester, blaming the “current authority” for “destroying the infrastructure of hospitals and universities.”
At the level of expatriate students who are suffering a great crisis with the management of their universities abroad due to the inability of their families to dispose of their foreign money deposited in Lebanese banks, Adel Ramadan, a student at the Faculty of Dentistry in Ukraine said: “The dollar crisis started at the beginning of the year and the cost of the fee was about $ 5,000, equivalent to 7 and a half million pounds, but now it has become about 40 million pounds.”
He noted that “his family submitted all the legal documents required to obtain dollar fees from the banks, but they were only able to get $ 600 of the total fee.”
He explained that “since the beginning of the year, his university has separated about 70 Lebanese students for not being able to ensure the payment of tuition in dollars.”
