Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi has made it clear that the stipends paid to all students on tertiary education courses are here to stay. This means that other ways to channel additional finance into the University must be found.

Students are rightly concerned about the amount of money allocated to University departments both for their daily running costs and for research purposes. Some departments receive less than €100 per student annually for all running costs, including maintenance and running of teaching laboratories. This is far less than students get as a stipend. Students demand more practical lab work, but rather than introducing students to modern techniques, the state of some laboratories verges on the unsafe.

All the quality control exercises currently being carried out at the University are certainly beneficial to ascertain high quality tertiary education, even if at times they encroach on the already limited time allocated for research. But the ridiculous funds allocated, especially where the use of laboratories is involved, only lead heads of department and those in charge of the laboratories to despair.

Tomorrow, the University Students' Council (KSU) is organising its annual general meeting. The AGM should consider ways of financing the University in the light of the international financial crisis and come up with suggestions of how the University should act.

The council represents all students on the main campus as well as those at the Junior College, the Institute of Health Care and the Medical School at Mater Dei Hospital, and Heritage Malta's Malta Centre of Restoration, Kalkara. There seems to be a major discussion on how the KSU executive should be made up. The executive is elected through a democratic election. However, there are suggestions that it should be made up of representatives from the many University student associations, as in this way it would be a more representative organisation.

Perhaps one could consider having a mixture of the two systems, with both representatives of the students' associations and direct representation by election. Since the number of students represented exceeds 10,000, increasing the number of members on the executive may not be a bad idea.

The KSU was founded more than 100 years ago. It voices students' concerns and plays an active part in ensuring that the bumps and hiccups that arise along the students' studies are smoothed out as best as can be. For example, the KSU is rightly concerned about delays in the publication of results. Perhaps it should also be concerned about the excessive length of time it takes to approve postgraduate research projects and the inordinate bureaucracy involved in getting an ethics committee approval.

However, for a long time, this was not the only activity the KSU carried out. Traditionally, the student council has taken an interest in local and foreign affairs. It is important that the students take an active role in current affairs.

The council could take the initiative of encouraging workers to take up studies at tertiary level. When companies' workload is slow, this could be the ideal time for employees who have not had the opportunity to have a tertiary education to do so. Other workers could benefit from continuing education programmes.

Hopefully, the KSU's AGM will be a fruitful and rewarding event of benefit to the students, the University and the country.