[…]year will not remove the significant barriers that currently face the hardest-pressed students and their families. We need a move towards publicly funded higher education now. We also don’t see any measures in this Budget to address the serious student accommodation crisis, which is making college inaccessible, or an extreme hardship, for many. “Without significant action on student housing, including the announcement of a new student accommodation strategy, capital grants for affordable purpose-built student accommodation and rent freezes – along with action on the cost-of-living – these tweaks and changes will not make much of a different to students who […]
The Union of Students in Ireland is delighted to run the Why Research Matters video competition 2022 in cooperation with the Irish Research Council. This competition aims to showcase the varied and high-quality work being undertaken by postgraduate researchers across the island. We ask the creative minds of the island’s postgraduate research community to produce a short video presentation about their research, and why it matters. Submissions are open from August 20th to September 10th, with winners to be announced by September 30th. The submitted videos will be assessed and shortlisted by the IRC and USI, with the winner being chosen […]
[…]stipends. USI Vice President for Postgraduate Affairs, Waqar Ahmed, has signed an open letter from the newly formed PhDs’ Collective Action Union (PCAU) requesting a meeting between the group’s Acting President and the various PhD funding agencies to discuss how stipends can be brought to a liveable and equitable level. As USI has stated on numerous occasions, PCAU says the current PhD stipend is insufficient on several accounts and the current cost-of-living crisis and inflation levels have promoted this new action. The letter, which has almost 500 signatures, states: “The Central Statistics Office (CSO) reported an approximate 9.1 per cent […]
