Off the top of my head, something in the vicinity of 600 euros a year. For students with limited financial means, it's reduced to something like 80 euros, though obviously the other costs of studying (transport, room & board, textbooks) are much more significant anyway, so they can get financial support for those things too.

So I was entirely serious when I said double or triple the tuition fees and it'll still be on the cheap side - but perhaps people will take their studies a bit more seriously.

And no, they *are* assured of getting a scholarship, though perhaps scholarship is the wrong word under those circumstances. When I say need-based, what I mean is that everyone who can prove their financial situation is not very good gets the financial support, it's not like there's a limited amount of scholarships or whatever. Cleverness has absolutely nothing to do with it.

Pretty much. I'm not a fan of American or British systems that look at secondary school grades, though. First and foremost, it's impossible to compare grades between schools (or hell, in many cases even between teachers within the same school), and it would discourage students from going into the hardest tracks (at my secondary school, grades for mathematics in the most maths-heavy track tended to be little above 60% even for the best students; it makes no sense to compare that to the 90%+ scores easily attained by those in less demanding tracks in terms of mathematics). And besides that, what with puberty and all, there's bound to be loads of students whose grades in secondary school have some irregularities or periods that they're awful, which says little about their ability to do well in university.

No, if I had to choose, I'd go with entrance exams - might be impractical in countries the size of the UK or US, but it's perfectly doable here, they already do it for medicine. Or at the very least, the non-binding entrance tests that have been suggested this year, to at least give students a good indication of whether they're likely to be successful in university. But no, our idiot of a minister has to oppose that. Bah.

Nope. You have to realize there are all of, er, five universities in Flanders if I'm not mistaken, of which only two large ones that offer pretty much everything, the other three are smaller and have a more limited range of subjects. It would be ridiculous to try and get a hierarchy between those universities in terms of quality, the way you have in the UK and USA. And see above for entry conditional on getting certain grades. My sister has a few people in her year who are going to British universities next year - one might go to Edinburgh, I understand - and so they do have those conditional offers, but while those might make sense in the UK, I find them ridiculous here. How is Edinburgh or Oxford or any British university ever going to evaluate whether the grades attained by those students here are at all comparable to what they'd be in Britain?

I'm not sure Belgian universities have much to do with your Public Law exam. But it's always fun to rant about my country, even if Ghavrel claims I do that all the time.