Is 36 hours in a country too soon to make judgements? Well, what are blogs for if not to fire off first impressions. And those impressions are that the coalition government here is on some dodgy ground. The massive student protest against fee rises has shaken up the establishment. While there is no doubt some protestors went too far, there is a feeling that this is the beginning of something much bigger.
As ever Will Hutton has some wise words to say on the subject. I don’t agree with everything in here. I would not say I am in favour of tuition fees. I reluctantly understand they are part of our tertiary funding system, especially as Hutton points out as part of the massification of tertiary education. For me though I still think we need a vision for tertiary education that emphasises the public good of tertiary education, within the resources we have available.
Hutton also makes the point that the pace and scale of the fee increases are wrong and that the additional money will not be part of improved quality, but quite the opposite. The parallels with the approach of National in New Zealand in the 1990s are striking.
But what struck me about Hutton’s piece was his concern about where social policy is going in the UK. He says
You cannot treat society as an accounting ledger and displace risk and debt on to ordinary people without offering a really good account of why – and with no sense of there being a social bargain. Otherwise, it is just one-way traffic, the state taking away and leaving ordinary people on their own.
and later
The message is explicit: you British are on your own. Buy a house, fend for yourself and now pay your tuition fees. Society is going missing.
That is very much the feeling I get (admittedly from only 24 hours here). We of course went through much of this in the 1980s and 1990s, and got a significant amount back in terms of society under the fifth Labour government. The current government, with the lesson of the 90s under its belt is moving more slowly, but inexorably in the same direction.
Society as Hutton is using it here is about a notion of our common good. That ordinary people, as he terms it, in return for their participation in democracy, paying their taxes and obeying the rule of law, get the life chances that come from social provision. That is a progressive vision. It is one that is under attack here.
Those I have talked to in the political world agree with Hutton’s conclusion that the student protest was only the beginning. If people perceive the social contract to have broken down, the consequences could be dire for the government.
Perhaps the Nats have learned to do things by stealth. Destruction under the radar.
With tuition fees, the lack of them is effectively a subsidy for the middle class. That’s how it works in most of tuition-free European countries. Unis take the best from the candidate pool, and well-off backgrounds are overrepresented among the successful applicants because they had the tuition, good schools and all kinds of support. So the majority of students benefitting from free education are those whose families could afford to pay for it if they had to.
You just made all of this up.
For starters it is a high level of tax on the middle class AND the upper class which pays for low fee universities in Europe, AND it is this low/no fee system which allows any one who does well at school *regardless of wealth* to attend the best universities and to not collect debt up to the eyeballs. That is what helps to build a society where every child can have the best education regardless of parental wealth.
Do you know what has happened now, in NZ? All our friendly political and business leaders of today, the ones who got their own tertiary educations for FREE have lumped the younger generation with the cost of THEIR university study in order to PAY THEMSELVES generous tax cuts.
i.e. its intergenerational theft. No need to ask why young qualified people are bailing out of this country ASAP eh?
@Colonial Viper: I didn’t make it up. Go to the top free unis and see who studies law and other majors with big earning potentials there. Maybe indeed the rich don’t get more than they paid for in taxes. But, free tertiary ed causes more people to compete for available places and kids from middle-upper take most of it; you won’t deny that socioeconomic background affects how much of his or her potential a child is given the chance to realize and when you have 20 applicants competing for one place at uni it shows. What I’m saying is progreesive fees dependent on family’s income would maybe be more just and easier on the country’s budget too.
You just made that up again.
In European countries with truly socialised top universities with low/no fees, there are also outstanding public schools available to all regardless of their socioeconomic background, backed up by community cultures which highly prize both education and educationalists.
In other words, societies which highly value education and make it highly accessible tend to have more equal participation in education across their society **at all levels of education: primary/secondary/tertiary**.
Bearing in mind that this discussion revolves around uni’s but tertiary trade educations are also very highly valued (and result in very highly paid jobs) in countries across Europe. Not everyone has to go and study law to be a success
or to be well paid.
@ Colonial Viper,
You can read this: “The real university cost in a “free” higher education country”, George Psacharopoulosa and George Papakonstantinou, Economics of Education Review, Volume 24, Issue 1, February 2005, Pages 103-108. It’s one of many articles discussing the problem. Copy-paste from the abstract: “Using a sample of over 3000 first year university entrants in Greece, we investigate the time and expense incurred in preparation for the highly competitive higher education entry examinations, as well as what students spend privately while attending university. [...] In addition, poorer families spend a higher share of their income on the education of their children. ”
There is a lot discussion about it, so that it’s surprising to see someone who is surprised with this. Did you live in any of those countries?
There are undoubtedly major inequalities in the UK, and the children of upper-socio-economic families do tend to be more successful at the “higher” end of university education, for many reasons. However, when I lived, studied and taught in London (towards the end of last century) study grants were pretty accessible, and far more available and substantial than what was available ehre when I left NZ.
I taught quite a bit in Further education. This is a sector for people/adults 16yrs and over, and is in between the school and university sectors. It is often referred to as providing a “second chance education”. It caters to a high proportion of students from lower socie-economic backgrounds and provides courses for adults who didn’t get school qualifications: eg A Levels, GCSE etc, as well as an extensive range of vocational and pre-vocational courses, and courses that provide an alternative entrance to uni courses.
When I was teaching in FE in London, students had a fairly wide access to grants for FE courses. I just checked to see if that is still the case. It seems it is:
http://www.fundingeducation.co.uk/paying-for-further-education-courses.html
And it gives details if you care to check the URL.
CV “it’s intergenerational theft.”
Yep. And then there were daft people like me who had the chance to go to Uni in the early/mid-80s (low, low fees), but instead had the good sense to leave it until the mid/late-90s (higher and higher fees, more and more debt).
In terms of Cameron’s Britain, looks like it’s going to be even more vicious than the Thatcher years.
I would be interested to hear if you notice any protests against the massive cuts to disability support in that last Budget. Almost every UK disability organisation seems to have a petition running on its website.
“In terms of Cameron’s Britain, looks like it’s going to be even more vicious than the Thatcher years.”
I doubt it will go on for as long as that, 1 term, if they’re lucky enough, but someone had better warn the Argentinians just in case.
Drawing parallels between NZ and the UK society is a bit unfair as circumstances are affected by vastly different criteria, but it does show how comparitively well off kiwis were left after the Labour decade here.
Sure, the present government is pinning it’s hope on the rest of the world sorting out their economies while Key and English sit twiddling their thumbs waiting for an ‘aggressive’ export led recovery, but the average New Zealander is hurting now, and it’s directly because of government ineptitude.
A more sinister situation is beginning to develop here in NZ. At a recent College prizegiving a young man I know told me that he had been turned down for primary teaching college, he’s an A-band student and a NZ u/19 summer sport squad member. I would have thought that a motivated clever male would have been welcomed with open arms, another good student and a national cycling champ to boot, had also missed out on getting to Uni. Today I learned that 150 people have applied for nursing training at a SI polytech and only 55 will get in. What is going on, are we returning to the 90s when we under trained our young to save a few bob and suffered the lack of skilled workers in the 2000s.
@Marsman – the stealth has been going on for quite a while; there have been many unpublicised cuts that will come back to haunt future generations.
@CV – I usually agree with you, but Melusina has actually talked about something that I know (from experience of the UK system) does happen. You are more likely to get into Medicine or Law if you are from ‘certain’ schools. Many years ago some researchers did an experiment using postcodes; they sent numerous applications, same qualifications, different post codes, guess who got the interviews – certainly not those from Moss side.
National government then, National government now…
Yep, That’s exactly what’s going on.
Hi Ian,
Reading your comment and rereading Melusina’s points I see what I think you are both saying: since most young people who will end up doing Law or Medicine will be from wealthy families anyway, raising fees on them will not make any real difference since their families will be able to afford the fee increases.
Ignoring the fact that the selection process for some universities seems totally broken and class driven from what you describe, what about the 10%-20%-30% of students who are from poorer backgrounds but got into Law or Medicine on merit? What happens to them when fees go up to 9000 quid p.a.?
The other fact I will bring to the table is this: at the height of the recession last year, 62% of Scottish school leavers went on to tertiary training or university. With that proportion, they can’t all be toffs and large tertiary fee increases will end up a huge burden on those children from working and middle class families.
That small proportion of Law and Med students from underprivileged families will simply get smaller.
Ian, (and Melusina) yes, that has been happening for some time – more middle and upper class people getting into top law and medicine courses. However, this is not so much an issue of tax paxer money going more to middle and upperclass people. People from lower socio-economic classes probably get access to as much tax payer funded study grants as others, but they are more likely to use the money on lower status uni courses of Further Education courses.
More people from the middle & upperclasses get onto top uni courses and jobs, as a result of the way cultural capital and social networks operate.
So it’s not so much an issue of who gets most taxes as an issue of the way the education system is structured and operates.
I said: “but they are more likely to use the money on lower status uni courses of Further Education courses.”
Should be “or Further Education courses.”
“…the state taking away and leaving ordinary people on their own.”
If only!
Please, the UK government is now responsible for over 50% of their GDP (it was 70% in the USSR) the UK’s government debt will be at 1,100,000,000,000 pounds at the end of next year, personal debt in the UK is 1,460,000,000,000 pounds…
I’d love to know where the money for free Uni for all (which Melusina quite rightly points out is utilised by the wealthy the most) is going to come from…
I liked the quote you use about society going missing, though I found that, in context, it’s actually about Labour. Hmm.
“New Labour was no better. The right to buy a council house was a good policy. The wrong policy was not to replace the stock. They should never have connived in the absurd policy of allowing housing benefit to soar to pay ever-higher rents for those on benefit or in low-paid jobs and simultaneously permitting council houses to be sold without their replacement. The message is explicit: you British are on your own. Buy a house, fend for yourself and now pay your tuition fees. Society is going missing.”
@Sammy. Sure Hutton was marking out a trend in UK politics, of which the tuition fees are the latest, and I think most extreme example. Interestingly the housing example is exactly what National in NZ is pushing through. Enabling purchase (which few tenants can afford) but not increasing the stock of housing.
I’d love to know where the money for free Uni for all (which Melusina quite rightly points out is utilised by the wealthy the most) is going to come from…
I didn’t think anyone was saying there should be universal grants for all students to go to uni. Yes, more wealthy students go to UK unis, and get access to higher status courses and/or unis than people from lower socio-economc backgrounds. But this does not mean that there aren’t quite a few poorer students who go to uni as well. And the inequalities have a lot to do with the unequal, highly competitive, status-conscious, hierarchical society in which the education system exists.
If you look around the website I linked to above, you will see that most Further and Higher edcation grants are means tested – usually against the parents’ incomes. However, independent adult students usually get bigger grants, based on their own income/wealth. So, basically poorer students tend to get more lucrative funding to go to uni than do students from wealthy backgrounds.
Also an article in this week’s Guardian claims that recently there has been an increase in the proportion of students from “working class” or “disadvantaged” backgrounds going to uni.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2010/nov/16/working-class-admissions-to-university-increase
@CV: I’m not against free tertiary education for all, if the country can easily afford it without taking away from something equally or more important. Most countries are not so lucky though, and if resources are limited, I think only those who can’t afford it should get it free. Tertiary education, while important, is not as critical as healthcare, housing and a few other services and I’d look at making it free only after those more basic services were already receiving all the funding they need. Otherwise, I’m for means-tested/progressive fees. You may disagree, but if so please explain why instead of denying that free uni benefits the middle and upper classes the most. And it’s not just Law and Medicine, most of the interesting Arts programmes too. I admit that recently unis started trying to change it, but only recently and the results are yet to be seen.
Does there really need to be such limited government resources that they need to choose between health, housing or education? Doesn’t that only happen if a government follows a neoliberal approach and aims for growth by cutting public services, and cutting tax, especially for those on higher incomes… and to aim for the unrealistic goal of endless gowth and always increasing profits for the big corporates?
In fact, a better approach to the current crisis is to raise taxes, especially for the better off (who have incomes way beyond what their efforts deserve), aim for more income equality, and invest more in public services, especially education. Spending now on education is an investment for a country for the future.
There is already evidence in the UK that progressive fees have increased the proportion of less well off people at university.
A lot of the inequality in the UK uni system is maintained, or brought about by their selective system of entry to education. All potential students apply through the UCAS clearing house with one application. On the application form they list their preferred courses at specific unis, in order of prefences. UCAS forwards the applications to the listed unis, and the student waits to get interviews at whichever unis decide they are interested.
Following the interviews, once a student gets an offer of a place/s (if they are so lucky), the student chooses one, and then they are guaranteed of a government grant, depending on their or their family’s income. There are a limited number of uni places available, so many people lose out. There is some evidence that going to the “right” school, family networks, and other aspects of cultural capital have an influence of the selection process.
With this sytsem, the UK used to be able to afford funding all the students who were accepted for uni places, before the rise of neoliberalism.
Melusina
This is my suggestion for a country to be able to afford something that it feels is important to society: you increase taxes on people, you increase taxes on businesses and you increase taxes on corporates. If you do that you won’t even have to design and fund systems around means testing for fees etc.
From my point of view its important to borrow less to fund budget deficits (as the government has to pay it all back anyway but with the additional costs of interests), but instead to tax more. Tax and spend is the way to go, not borrow and spend.
In the short term you are correct. No one is going to miss having a degree for a week, while not having a house to live in for a week is going to be rather impactful. But we also know that the more educated someone is the less health services they will need, the less likely they are going to need costly social services etc.
So in the long term, all you do is shoot your society in the foot.
Now lets remember that this is occurring at the same time City of London financiers and big bankers are back to paying themselves billions in bonuses, after the Government has given them billions in bailouts.
My question more generally is: why are we in a system where the masses of people are having to suffer the financial consequences inflicted upon society by a very small group?
@ Carol, CV
I understand what you mean. I am focused on the basics because I know a few people who have problems here, like HNZ tenants put into a house that’s basically unfit for habitation. So I’m a bit bitter when less critical things are being given more attention.
There is, of course, also the problem of difficulties of collecting taxes, especially from companies, in a globalized world where companies and individuals can quite easily move their headquarters or residence. Raising the taxes without taking this into account wouldn’t bring much money, but what we’d need here would be worldwide cooperation between countries in this matter…