By Rose Tedeschi
Higher education in the UK is in a state of crisis, with universities seeing more strikes, fewer students, and many claiming to be on the edge of bankruptcy. The root cause of the crisis is the conscious attempt by successive governments to cut spending on education and to make students pay for the shortfall.
In 2012, the coalition government raised the cap on university fees to £9,000, a move which sparked outrage across the student population. The controversial move tripled the fees and immediately alienated hundreds of thousands of people worried about affording a degree course. Indeed, the number of students dropped by nearly a quarter of a million in the years following the rise and did not reach pre-2012 levels until 2019.
The cap, however, was frozen at £9,250 in 2017. The fees have now devalued to less than £6,000 in 2012 prices, and nearly all universities will seek to cut costs by the end of 2024. As a result many universities started to rely heavily on international students, who have to pay much higher fees—some more than four times the UK cap.
Not only is this tactic highly exploitative and discriminatory, it was also doomed to fail against the backdrop of anti-immigration and tighter visa restrictions. With international students no longer feeling welcome or actively prevented from studying in the UK due to visa stipulations, the fragility of the current system is brutally exposed.
This proved, once again, that immigration enhances both our culture and economy. Attempts to stop migration continue to have huge ramifications for all sectors.
Universities UK, which represents over 140 universities, argues that the only answer to this crisis is to raise tuition fees once again. This not only puts the financial burden onto students, but also, as Jacobin puts it, transforms students ‘from intellectual participants, whose input in the classroom might further knowledge production and critical inquiry, into end users… anxious only to get the most value for their money’.
And this is not the fault of the students. Of course anyone committing themselves to a minimum of £27,750 worth of debt to be chained to them for the next 40 years would want to believe that it was worthwhile.
On the contrary, a further increase in fees and a resulting drop in student numbers would be catastrophic to the future of academia and would have an enormous knock-on effect for key industries, like medicine, teaching, engineering and scientific research (which has proven itself essential over the Covid-19 pandemic and in the rapid development of vaccines).
Another approach is called for by the Universities and Colleges Union, which demands a government bailout of universities. But even if they were successful in convincing the government—education secretary Bridget Phillipson has responded that universities should ‘manage their own budgets’—this would only ever be a short-term solution.
It doesn’t address the real problem, that the entire sector of higher education is treated and operated like a business, with students shopping for the best degrees or best universities. Wealthier students can purchase their degrees and working class students end up saddled with thousands of pounds of debt.
Far from Blair’s utopian ideas of everyone going to university and the endless production of educated workers, the introduction and then price hikes of tuition fees have only contributed to the two-tier society: one for the wealthy, another for the workers.
The only solution is to completely change the funding model of higher education: scrapping tuition fees and student debt, and funding universities with state investment, paid for by higher taxes on the rich. Public investment in education, as part of a wider economic plan, is needed in order to train the next generation, and to develop science and culture.
All education should be free at the point of use to everyone, regardless of age, nationality or class. We cannot continue to allow young adults with no experience of what they are signing up for, to commit themselves to something that will affect them for decades, based solely on marketing.
End university fees and reinstate living student grants for all, so we can combat educational discrimination.
