The cost of education

Today is your last opportunity to cast a vote in the referendum on higher education funding. While no doubt you await the final decision on the settled policy of the DSU with baited breath, we thought we might as well throw in our two cents.
In our last edition we published a letter by the president of Durham’s Lib Dem society, Michael Karim, in which he purported to correct a statement in our newspaper that the Lib Dems had undergone a ‘U-turn’ on the issue of tuition fees. His argument was that Labour and the Conservatives are ‘ideologically’ in support of tuition fees, whereas the Liberal Democrats would like to abolish them but have recognised there are other priorities in these hard economic times.
This distinction implies that there is something like thought or ‘ideology’ behind the desire of the Lib Dems to not have people paying for things (especially the people who might vote for them). On the contrary, most of us don’t like paying for things: we don’t need to justify our position with reference to philosophy, it is just preferable to not have to part with cash. The difficulty is that somebody has to pay for further education. The policy question remains simply a choice of whether to burden students or the taxpayer. It is not clear what ideological point of difference is snuffed out by there being less cash to go around; the issue remains essentially the same, albeit more pressing.
What underlies the ‘principled’ opposition to tuition fees is the idea that further education is to the general good, and so deserves to be supported by the state. This is an assumption that does not bear very close analysis. We have built our economy, as we now see all too clearly, on hot air: armies of graduates with abstruse and sometimes ridiculous degrees do not underpin future prosperity. University education as a whole does not pay its own way, so there is no point operating under the illusion that it does. It is of course necessary to many of our important industries, but its sheer scale and the proliferation of certain less rigorous or practical degrees is simply a luxury.
This is not to say that those of us who have our noses in Chaucer or Anthropology – or even Media Studies – should apologise for our presence. We should simply recognise that we, rather than the state, are the primary beneficiaries of our degrees. We hope to find a better job at the end of the day, we enjoy ourselves, we expand our knowledge. Why is it supposedly principled or social democratic to assume that other people should pay for these three or four years of indulgence? To have people demand this while masquerading as radicals is, frankly, insufferable.
And if the stress placed on our pockets leads us to reassess why we are here in the first place, is that such a bad thing? We are a diverse bunch, and so are our reasons for studying. Many of us simply aren’t sure what else we would do; some of us are just after three years of watching Deal or No Deal with a hangover; most of us have some interest in our chosen subjects. But the outstanding truth is that few among us could honestly claim that we are here to benefit others.
Perhaps it is more important, however, that there is some mechanism to correct the government’s peculiar notion that it is a smart plan to have half of all school leavers in further education by 2010. It is clear that this would be a nice outcome, but not at all clear that we can afford it. Back in the 1960s, when the government paid for everything, there were only six percent of school leavers in further education. The resultant slashing in funding per capita is now being felt dramatically by British universities.
Sometimes, you find a treasure trove sunk at the bottom of a river: the rest of the time, you have to get real.