Belgium’s French-speaking universities have criticised a controversial tuition fee increase approved by parliament, warning that students are being asked to pay more for a chronically underfunded system.

The rise that will take fees over €1,000 (Rs.1.08 lakh) annually will “in no way benefit universities”, according to Anne-Sophie Nyssen, chair of the Rectors’ Council of the French-speaking universities of Belgium (CRef). “Its sole purpose is to help reduce the deficit in the accounts of the Wallonia-Brussels Federation by shifting a greater share of the cost of studies on to students and their families,” she says, referring to multi-lingual Belgium’s French Community government. Her comments came after parliament approved a controversial education package on June 5, following protests in Brussels that resulted in violent clashes between police and demonstrators.

As well as increasing tuition fees from €835 (Rs.90,304) to €1,194 at the six French-speaking universities, the package also includes wider changes affecting secondary and primary education. While the demonstrations mostly focused on the former, students’ unions also mobilised against the tuition fee hike.

Academics say while the tuition hike has attracted significant attention, it obscures a more serious challenge facing the sector — declining public investment in higher education. “The rise in tuition fees in francophone higher education is still relatively modest,” says Dirk Jacobs, a sociology professor at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles.

Jacobs says 42 percent of students will either pay no fees or reduced rates under the tiered system that includes scholarships and low-income provisions. “The state still covers the bulk of tuition costs and there is a correction for socio-economically disfavoured groups. This is not a radical change of policy,” he says. But he adds that university budgets have not kept pace with rising student numbers, which have increased by 40 percent over the past two decades. “This has led to a diminishing of spending by the state of 15 percent per student over the last 20 years,” he adds.

Vincent Vandenberghe, an economics professor at Universite Catholique de Louvain, contends that the increase will restore the real value of fees that had been frozen for more than a decade. “Since 2011, the government in the French-speaking region has stopped indexing tuition fees to the cost of living. So in real terms, tuition fees have gone down. Now the government has put them back to the 2011 level,” he says. “For an economist, it’s not a big deal. But symbolically and politically, it is.”