soL English

In Middle East Technical University, course registrations have ended up. While the students who have been able to pay the school fee were competing virtually with each other to register in computer labs, some dialogues have revealed the fact that registrations are also on the black market now!

soL (Ankara) Summer season is about to start in one of the leading universities in Turkey, METU. Registrations for the summer school, which are demanded greatly by the students to increase their average score or to pass the courses they failed, now witness to a great injustice.

In order to register for a course in METU, you have to pay the high “tuition fee” per credit as in the example of many universities. For instance, an engineering student has to pay 135 TL for a three-credit course. If the same student is in the prep school, s/he has to pay 384 TL per semester. The ones lucky enough to pay the fee before deadline hurry towards the computers.

Because the computers in the campus are given priority when connecting to the system, long queues are formed in the computer labs. There begins a keen competition to benefit from the limited quota. You have to overcome those obstacles to be able to register for the course you have to take so as not to extend the school term.

“For how much will you let me have 211?”
However, in such a course market in which everything is liberal, when supply-demand imbalance arises, the courses become available on the black market. The dialogues during the registrations have revealed the fact that some students register for the courses they do not need, and hand them over “in exchange for a little compensation”. Recently, such dialogues have begun to be heard among the students in the labs : “The market value of the business is 50 TL” , “For how much will you let me have 211?”

Within the next days, it may be expected for some foxes to say “My father is rich, why would I queue at 9 o'clock in the early morning?”. In that case, it is an issue of concern whether the authorities in METU will rely on the invisible hand of Adam Smith or resort to demand-promoting central interventions in order to prevent that black market!