Testing tuition

Students in the UK pay £9000 yearly for their tuition. This policy was chosen over pursuing a graduate tax or reducing tuition fees in favour of alternative taxation methods. Some would argue that tertiary education is just like primary and secondary education, in that the onus isn’t on students to pay it, but rather that economically active members of society ought to pay the costs of educating the rest of us, given that educating people benefits everyone. The flipside of this is that university education is, to a certain degree, differentiated from the education that comes before it, in that it arguably isn’t a necessary step but rather a choice, for which students should be prepared to pay.

Suffice to say, this article isn’t about arguing whether or not tuition fees are fair, but whether they make sense, and whether students are really devoid of some of the blame in this whole debacle.

We start with a question: What about the continent? The European context here really deserves talking about, and it rarely seems to receive a look-in whenever an increase or decrease in tuition fees is in the works. For example, tuition is free to nationals in the Nordics, Estonia, France, Malta, and Germany. This includes supplementary living grants and loans dependent on income. When proponents of free education in the UK cite this kind of evidence, the simplified response tends to be ‘demographics in these countries enables free tuition; there are simply too many undergraduates in the UK nowadays’. True or false this may be, demography is a sliding scale. Yes, the United Kingdom is more populous than many of the countries listed above, but it also has very high levels of personal wealth. Whether or not this asset should be taken advantage of is up for debate, but more to the point – why are there so many more undergraduates in the UK than there seem to be in other EU states?

This is what I believe to be the central issue of UK higher education: it’s too easy, which in turn depresses its value for both the student and the employer.

First of all, let’s look at some of the universities you could be attending in the UK. Some of them are, and you’ll excuse me for saying this, cack. Enrol at London Met and your odds of finding a career when you leave are less than half. Go to Trinity St. David, and there’s 22 students per professor. Alternatively, study at Bucks New University, and your odds of student satisfaction are slashed by a quarter. Truthfully, I picked the three worst universities from The Guardian’s 2016 league tables, but you hopefully get my point. Some universities in the UK are just not very good, which brings into question whether it’s even worth studying (and sapping the dear old government of thousands of pounds in the process) if your heart’s set on the worst university in the country, Bucks New.

Furthermore, some degrees are bound to be worth pence at best in the job market. Say you’ve nabbed a Third Class in Media and Television from Edge Hill University. Either you were far too busy with extracurricular activity to focus on your degree, you couldn’t be bothered, or you realised the whole thing was slightly pointless. A third isn’t a proud beacon of your achievement; it’s a sign that it might’ve been wiser for you to not go to university. And that’s not even considering what happens if you just fail.

These are the kinds of things that bear considering when you’re one of the people torn over whether or not to go to university. Yes, every country is bound to have its fair share of shoddy universities and shoddier degrees (BA circus performance, anyone?) but attending them or not is your choice.

This brings me to why I believe fees are absent from the education system in multiple EU countries. It’s because other countries make education harder instead. France, for example, kicks you out if you don’t survive the testing of first semester. It’s hard to deny that some people attending university in the UK will just coast, and leave with a degree that doesn’t quite stand up to scrutiny; a system that makes students put effort in to keep their place will both encourage high performance and discourage those without the requisite commitment from attending. This impetus is clever in that it doesn’t hit potentially amazing graduates from less privileged backgrounds in the same way as tuition fees.

This article isn’t trying to say that the UK should transition to a French style of tuition where most students pay no fees and testing runs rampant. Rather, I’m advocating for a system that maximises fairness and doesn’t compromise usability. Universities across the UK are currently operating above capacity, a problem I’ve seen first-hand at UCL. This leads to exorbitant accommodation fees to pay for on-campus development projects. Even the Provost tells us he needs more money to make the university compatible with an ever-growing student base (one that’s increased by more than a third in the last two years) whilst students are squeezed into ever-smaller seminar rooms. Decrease the number of reluctant university-goers, and you solve the capacity problem, whilst simultaneously reducing the humungous quantity of loan payments the government currently has to make. I’m not saying make admissions more difficult, but rather, make students work harder to stay at university. If the choice is between that, and bringing fees up to £11500 pa, I know what I’d rather.

Best of luck for exam season. If I had things my way, it might just matter a little more.