Education Policy Department

The Department for Educational Policy is responsible for the educational policy agendas of the Austrian National Union of Students (ÖH) and is established at the ÖH Federal Council according to § 36 Abs 2 Z 1 Hochschülerinnen- und Hochschülerschaftsgesetz 2014 (HSG).

You can reach the Department for Education Policy by e-mail or by phone at +43/1/310 88 80 -38. Personal consultations can be arranged in urgent individual cases only after an appointment has been made and within the consultation hours. If you would like to make an appointment for a personal consultation, please send us an email with your request and the reason for the personal consultation. Please note that a personal consultation cannot take place without an appointment.

We stand and fight for:

Open, emancipatory institutions of higher education that
provide equal access regardless of origin, socio-economic circumstances, gender and age,
take an active role in society,
Enable democratic participation by all members of the university,
Live freedom of learning and self-directed study,
Provide space for critical examination of social processes, questions and challenges
Structural improvement of studyability through corresponding legal foundations.

We fight against:

Neoliberal ideas of efficiency in education, science and teaching, which force students, scientific and general university staff and also universities themselves into competition with each other.
Withdrawal of public funding of educational institutions and increase in private sponsorship of higher education infrastructure and direct marketing of scientific results, which calls into question the freedom of research and teaching.
Tuition, entrance restrictions, and minimum course requirements because these prevent equal access to higher education.
The demand for purely labor market-oriented education of students, which leads to underfunding, devaluation and abolition of studies that do not fit into a marketing scheme.

How we achieve it:

We organize emancipatory projects and events to raise awareness about our concept of higher education and to give students the opportunity to become active themselves.
We network the units for educational policy and student representatives of the individual universities with each other in order to stand strong together.
We draw up statements on draft legislation and prepare the latest developments in education policy.
We initiate and accompany studies, legal actions and decision-making processes to improve the situation of students.
We are part of nationwide committees and working groups on higher education policy and negotiate there with representatives of universities and ministries.
We coordinate student legal advising for the federal representative office.