The protest, called by the National Union of Students (NUS), will oppose soaring levels of student debt, attempts by the government to lift the cap on its £3,000 a year top-up fees and the drive to embed the market deeper into education.

Tens of thousands of students were expected to attend. The mobilisation was given added urgency last week when the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service released figures showing a decrease of 3.7 percent - or 15,163 students - in the numbers taking up university places.

The NUS and the lecturers’ UCU union blamed the fall on the introduction of university top-up fees of up to £3,000, which came into effect at the start of the academic year.

Anna Bogdanova, a student at Warwick university, is part of its organising committee building for the demonstration. She told Socialist Worker, “We’re hoping to bring four coachloads of students.

“The demo can bring students together and show that individuals are not isolated in opposing attempts to raise the cap on top-up fees.

“Maybe this will lead on from a campaign over top-up fees to become a campaign demanding free education.”

Sian Ruddick is a student at Swansea university. She said, “There has been a real change of mood on campus this year.

“There’s a meeting this week to put forward the arguments over education funding. It is hosted by the student union and I’ve been invited to speak as a Respect representative.

“This is the first time in years that the number of students going to university has fallen. The government says you can pay back £9,000 once you graduate. But that just doesn’t seem like an option for many working class students.”

He described himself as standing out as the best and most experienced among all the Presidential aspirants in his party, stressing that with education as number one priority, "it will make us masters of our environment and not the other way round."

He argued that development should be about man and should be centered on man. "For me, Education is every thing and that will be the basis of the other things we are going to unfold as we move forward.".

On what he thought of the likely conduct of INEC in the forthcoming elections, he said the issue of neutrality of INEC and the provision of level playing ground for all the political parties is important.

That is the view of Zombodze MP Titus Thwala who said free education will never come cheap but had to be toiled for as ‘there was nothing for mahhala!

“Talking of free education without sacrificing is tantamount to expecting rain without the thunder and the lightning; it’s like expecting a crop without the tilling of the land. Yes, it’s like expecting milk without the feeding of the cows.

“In simple terms, it’s like expecting a harvest where you have not sown and gathering where one has not scattered. My humble suggestion would be that the minister holds an education indaba where all stakeholders, like SNAT, parents churches, business community, SFTU, SNACS and other organised formations would come together and discuss the way forward in education,” MP Thwala said.

He said during the indaba, he would suggest that all Swazis in gainful employment contribute a certain percentage, making an example of 0.5 percent of their monthly income, towards free education. This could mean, for instance, that those earning E1 000 a month part with Five Emalangeni monthly towards realisation of free education.

MP Thwala was speaking at Phonjwane Primary School on Friday during a speech and prize giving day where he was the Guest Speaker.

Advocates of programs that allow college students to study abroad are working to put the programs within reach of more Latinos.

Officials at Global Learning Semesters Inc., an organization that promotes study abroad programs, say Latino students enroll in international study programs at about half the rate of all college students.

The organization has partnered with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities to secure $8 million in scholarships to help Latino students take part in international study programs.

Officials with Global Learning Semesters hope their multimillion-dollar scholarship fund - to be distributed over 10 years - will increase Latinos' numbers in study abroad programs nationwide.

"Part of our mission is helping to educate America's leaders of tomorrow, and we're certain that having some international experience and understanding of other cultures is integral to that," said Antonis Polemitis, president of Global Learning Semesters.

"Latino students aren't getting that exposure," he added.

Officials point the finger at several factors - affordability, limited awareness of programs and cultural issues.

According to the Institute of

"Sakshat", a portal which promises to provide one stop solution to educational requirements, is a key initiative of the Human Resource Development Ministry.

Observing that nearly 10 million youth were injected into the employment market every year, Kalam said the country also needed large number of talented youth with education for the task of knowledge acquisition, knowledge imparting, knowledge creation and knowledge sharing in the 21st century.

"A National Policy for creating a Global Human Development Cadre for India has to emerge," he told a function to launch the initiative. Among others present at the launch ceremony were HRD Minister Arjun Singh.

Sakshat programme should think of extending the system for providing world class vocational skills to youth for making them internationally competitive, Kalam told the gathering of academics and students.

"We have to start right now to realise this goal since the overall time available for such an educational growth is short," he added.

Lauding the project, Singh reiterated UPA government's commitment to ensure that no person was deprived of education on economic or social reasons.

When he decided to spend a semester in Budapest last year, Manveer Sahota, 22, didn't know much about the country of Hungary, other than it was part of the old Austrian Empire.

"I wanted to enrich my knowledge of that area and kind of go into the unknown," said Sahota, who is one of about 200 students at California State University, Sacramento, who studied abroad last year.

A business major and sociology minor, Sahota became fascinated with how people in the Eastern European country were adjusting after decades of communist rule -- "basically lifting themselves up by their bootstraps to catch up to the rest of the world."

While few students take advantage of foreign exchange programs in high school, studying abroad in college is considered by many as a rite of passage. About 1,200 students at the University of California, Davis, spent a summer to a year studying in one of 40 countries.

Even community college students have the opportunity. The Los Rios Community College District, with four campuses in the Sacramento area, offers semester-long and summer trips to a rotating list of overseas cities, including Beijing; Dublin, Ireland; Florence, Italy; London; Madrid, Spain; and Paris. About 25 to 40 students go each semester.

Sahota, who lived in an apartment with students from France and Italy, said it was a life-changing experience.

"It also makes people more marketable," he said, adding he already scored an internship with the U.S. Department of Commerce and hopes to work overseas one day.

In fact, encouraging students to live in a foreign country to learn about another culture has become a national priority since the Sept. 11 attacks -- so much so that Congress declared 2006 the "Year of Study Abroad."

Last November, federal lawmakers passed a resolution "to address a serious deficit in global competence in the United States," with a goal of sending an additional 1 million American students to study in a foreign country in the next 10 years.

The resolution cited a National Geographic survey, which found that 87 percent of students in the United States between the ages of 18 and 24 cannot locate Iraq on a world map, 83 percent cannot find Afghanistan, 58 percent cannot find Japan and 11 percent cannot find the United States.

About 190,000 college students -- roughly 1 percent of all undergraduates -- studied abroad in the 2004-05 school year, according to the nonprofit Institute of International Education.

A larger percentage wants to go, but students are scared away by the potential cost, much more than concerns about speaking the language or transferring academic credits, according to a recent poll by IIEPassport.org and StudyAbroad.com, online study-abroad resources.

Costs vary depending on locations and programs. In addition to regular tuition, students have to factor in plane tickets, the higher cost of living in cities such as London and Paris, and other expenses.

However, as Sahota found, "it was actually a lot cheaper" living in Budapest than Sacramento.

Many students also are surprised to learn that their financial aid is transferable to study-abroad programs, said Kimberly Gradel, study abroad adviser for IIEPassport.org.

Scholarships may also be available.

To address students' concerns that science majors have few opportunities to study abroad during the school year, Yale administrators are working on giving more options to those sick of Science Hill.

Officials said the addition of undergraduates to the joint program in astronomy between Yale and the Universidad de Chile is part of recent trend in academia to improve study abroad opportunities specifically meant for science majors. Only 13.4 percent of Yale students studying abroad were majoring in the physical sciences, engineering and health sciences, according to the most recently published statistics by the Yale Institute for International Education.

This trend is not just limited to Yale. On Oct. 13, a faculty panel at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended a development of exchange partnerships with universities overseas and more flexible curricular requirements to encourage MIT students to study abroad.

Some students majoring in the sciences said low rates of study abroad are partly due to the large number of courses that science and engineering majors must take for their major, compared to humanities and social science students.

Students working towards a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering, for example, must fulfill 18 course credits beyond the prerequisites for the major. By contrast, political science majors take eleven courses with no prerequisites. These major requirements are in addition to the distributional requirements mandated by Yale College.

Xinyuan Wu '09, a biomedical engineering major who is planning on going to medical school, said she is not planning to study abroad during the academic year because junior year, the traditional time to study abroad, is an important time to be on campus for medical students. Medical school candidates use junior year to gather material for medical school applications, to take the Medical College Admission Test and to receive recommendations from professors. But she said she would like to study abroad the summer after her sophomore year.

But Karyn Jones, director of the study abroad program at the Yale International Education and Fellowship Programs office, said it is possible for science majors to find acceptable curricular offerings at universities overseas. Students' options vary widely depending on their language capabilities and goals for time spent abroad, she said.

"There are some science majors who study abroad and want to take a break and do distributional requirements," Jones said. "Others do field study through programs like the Organization for Tropical Studies, and others are going to want to take science courses at universities."

While Jones said she realized that science and engineering majors must fulfill a relatively large number of requirements, she said there are some students - though not many - who are able to find the time and flexibility to travel to another country.

Michael Loewenberg, director of undergraduate studies of chemical engineering, said while the students in his department who go abroad are usually taking distributional rather than science courses, he does not feel that the major's requirements are insurmountable.

"We have two students [majoring in chemical engineering] abroad this semester," Loewenberg said. "I don't think it does require a lot of planning ahead, since it's usually just students who just happen to have gotten a head start [on fulfilling their course requirements]."

For some students like Wu, spending a year or semester abroad is out of the question. But for other students, their prospects for going abroad largely depends on the way they have shaped or are planning to shape their course loads during their time at Yale.

Biomedical engineering major Allison Polland '07 spent the second semester of her junior year studying at the Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, where she was able to take classes at one of the most prominent engineering schools in Spain. She said her participation in a Syracuse University study abroad program allowed her to see how the study of engineering differed at Yale and in Spain, where she felt the focus was more on career-oriented education.

Although Polland said she had to take a relatively large course load of 5.5 credits for two semesters in a row and will spend her second semester of senior year taking the junior year requirements she missed, she is very happy about her decision to study abroad.

"I made friends I'm still in touch with who I'll be able to visit anytime I go to Spain in next 20 years," Polland said. "It is still a really meaningful and continuing experience."

Panels, workshops and sessions at several locations on campus will provide information on topics such as gaining advantage in the work force by studying abroad, finding an overseas health care internship, practicing international law and starting an international nonprofit. A complete schedule is available online.

The event is sponsored by the Office of Career Services and several other campus groups. For more information, contact Sara Vancil at (609) 258-3325.