The Price of Education

Universities minister David Willetts has, according to today’s Guardian, given ‘his clearest indication yet that students could soon be forced to pay higher tuition fees’. Student tuition fees have proven a hot topic throughout the aftermath of the banking crisis, as top-ranking universities have been faced with deep spending cuts, lay-offs and course restructuring in an effort to ride out the wave of austerity. Oxford and Cambridge have long wished to break through the £3,225 a year cap on fees, in an attempt to compete with research institutions like Harvard, Yale and other US Ivy League private universities. Of course, Oxford and Cambridge tend to attract students whose parents have much deeper wallets than most. There is, after all, a reason why an equivalent of the Bullingdon Club does not operate at one of the many former polys across the country. The price of having 'Oxon' or 'Cantab' attached to your degree is likely to triple if chancellors get their way; and many students are likely to be priced out of higher education for fear of leaving university with debts that won't be repaid for decades.

This issue also highlights one of the manifold rifts within the Tory/Lib Dem coalition; one that students throughout Britain will hope won’t fall in line with those that Nick Clegg has already dismissed in his decorative role as Deputy Prime Minister. The Lib Dems fought an election campaign based on many principles, one of which was the scrapping of unfair student tuition fees. Both Clegg and Vince Cable have already sacrificed many of their flagship policies in what we may presume were attempts to allow the coalition government to operate smoothly in its first months. As much as Mr. Willetts’ comments infuriate me, I know that Labour hadn’t correctly answered the student finance question either. Wanting to put ten or twenty thousand more students into higher education whilst slashing university spending, coupled with an already inefficient and overburdened Student Loans Company, would no doubt have proved rather disastrous.

Willetts wants more school-leavers to ‘consider apprenticeships as a possible route into higher education’. This has my full and wholehearted support. However, I would not wish to take an apprenticeship simply because that is not a route in which my skills might flourish. My talents in English are all I have ever aspired to cultivate throughout my education, and attending a Russell Group university like Leeds is one of the best paths that I might take with that end in mind. However, it is a costly one. One that I would never be able to take without the aid of student loans. As a student from a low-income, single parent household, I already receive the maximum amount of loans and grants available. Thus I, like many thousands of others, am already likely to leave university in the depths of a quite obscene debt. I know others here whose tuition fees won’t trouble them in the slightest, whose parents or family will even be able to entirely foot the bills at the end. That’s a situation I won’t know, and I’m glad of that fact. I would rather work my way out of debt in the knowledge that responsibility for my education lay with me. Though it is an expensive responsibility.

I am incredibly proud to be a student at a prestigious Redbrick university, and to have consistently achieved highly in my work here. I refuse to deny the gratifying knowledge that I am doing the best I possibly can and that I am justifying my being here. I should not be made to feel as though I do not have a right to study alongside, and surpass, the sons and daughters of millionaires; I should not be made to question my right to knowledge because of fiscal constraints. If studying at university level is an irresponsible course of action due to the costs incurred, then I would vehemently defend my irresponsibility against any government that compels me to choose between my money and my aspirations.