Nina Power:
Absurd student debt has ended mass inclusion – our
future is at risk
Unlike my generation, who left university with little or no debt, graduates
must now repay an average of £26,000
When I tell my students that in 1997 I didn't have to pay any fees for my
degree, they often look at me in disbelief. This disbelief quickly turns into
anger, however, when they reflect on the amount of debt they have had to incur,
15 years down the line, as a result of university fees, the cost of living in
London and childcare so they can attend class (many university creches have
closed in recent years). While many of my students also work during term time –
often more than the university-recommended 16 hours a week maximum – just so
they can stay afloat, their student loans quietly pile up, with
average debt now standing at £26,000 and
post-graduation unemployment beckoning. As students protesting at cuts to
the Californian university system in 2009 put it:
"We work and we borrow in order to work and to borrow."
One recent graduate, Alice, describes her situation like this:
"I owe just over £30,000, and since graduating two years ago I have not
earned over the amount that I need in order to start paying it back. To be
honest, I'm glad, because I don't feel like I should have to pay it back.
Instead, I can watch the debt grow and grow, and when I receive a letter to
tell me how much I owe it just reminds me of the absurdity of the
situation."
It is this "absurdity" that students fought to avoid at protests in 2010, and
it comes at the culmination of a long wave of fee increases, and what now looks
like a historic U-turn on mass inclusion.
How far we have come from the Robbins Report in
1963, which called for a "co-ordinated system of higher education" that "should
provide for those who had the qualifications and the willingness to pursue
higher education … it should eliminate artificial differences of status and
recognise hierarchy only in so far as it was based on function and attainment".
Lionel Robbins was no socialist, and his report was, of course, written in an
era before the mass expansion of higher education (participation doubled from
15% in 1988 to over 30% in 1992), but his recognition of the desire of many to
gain a university education is at odds with the current government's quotas and
extortionate fees. In
Grayson Perry's recent Channel 4 series on class and taste, the role of the
university in transforming people's lives and aspirations couldn't have been
clearer.
In the 20th century we saw a shift from the idea of university for the few to
mass expansion in the postwar period, and then again in the 80s and 90s. In
1992, when former polytechnics gained the right to call themselves universities
and could award their own degrees, seeds of discontent among some at the
existing universities were sown, which culminated in the ongoing
call by the Russell Group to be permitted to set their own fees. At the same
time,
university fees have shifted from £1,000 in 1998 to £3,000 in 2004, rising
to £3,290 by 2010-11 before the £9,000 upper limit new students will face later
this year.
The mass expansion of higher education, and all the benefits that came with
it for individuals and society alike, is over. If today's graduate faces an
uncertain future, so do many of the universities. A University College Union
report from 2010 suggested that more than a third of UK universities (Higher
Education Institutions) – 49 institutions –
could close as a result of government funding cuts. Already we have seen the
impact of the new regime as arts and humanities departments in post-92
universities close subject after subject, rendering philosophy, history,
classics and many others the preserve of the elite.
With the new fee regime due to come into operation this autumn, and the vast
majority (86%) of students needing to borrow up to £9,000 a year for fees alone,
what kind of future will today's graduate have? With
graduate unemployment now at 25% , many, particularly those from poorer
backgrounds, will feel that the cost of going to university is too high.
The loans students are taking out are "not
merely income contingent, but future-policy contingent" as Andrew McGettigan
points out, meaning that future governments could alter the terms of repayment
and the threshold for paying loans back (this has already happened in
New Zealand). When
David Willetts casually said, ahead of recent policy changes, that "the
so-called debt [students] have is more like an obligation to pay higher income
tax," and "it's like a tax, you only start paying it if you earn more than
£21,000", he neglected to address the uncertainty of these schemes: while
student debt is currently written off after 25 years (35 years for Scottish
domicile students), rising to 30 years after 2012, the shifting nature of this
arrangement adds yet another layer of uncertainty for future students. With
little protection over the nature of the loans, who owns them and what the
future terms might be, who is in a position to take this kind of gamble on their
own future?
Student debt is only one form of this particular kind of economic burden:
those borrowing to study are also needing to take out bank loans, overdrafts,
credit cards and other forms of borrowing, with the government very recently
declaring that: "It
has been a longstanding principle of student support that maintenance grants and
loans are generally paid as a contribution towards living costs rather than to
cover them in their entirety." Those without parental support or other
financial security are not able to make up the shortfall without access to
rapacious and often brutal forms of credit on top of massive student loans: this
kind of borrowing may well pose even more of a problem than fee debt for many.
It is time for serious thinking about the role of debt, and not just in
relation to students. As David Graeber argues in his recent book Debt: The First
5,000 Years:
"It seems to me that we are long overdue for some kind of biblical-style
jubilee: one that would affect both international debt and consumer debt. It
would be salutary not just because it would relieve so much genuine human
suffering, but also because it would be our way of reminding ourselves that
money is not ineffable, that paying one's debts is not the essence of
morality, that all these things are human arrangements and that if democracy
is to mean anything, it is the ability to all agree to arrange things in a
different way."
As the
protesters in Quebec are all too aware, the introduction of tuition fees can
only go one way: they have seen the momentous increase in costs in the US,
England and elsewhere and realise that the only way to prevent this happening in
Quebec is to protest what might seem a rather minimal amount (the proposed fee
increase they are protesting against works out at £203, but is set to rise to
around C$3,800 (£2,375) by 2016). They are right to protest, and even more so to
link student debt to broader immiseration.
As Alice says:
"I have a sister who is 17 and would have been getting EMA [education
maintenance allowance] now if it wasn't for the recent changes. Her college
are pushing her to apply for university (to keep their stats up presumably)
but she's unsure whether to incur the debt when the subject areas that
interest her the most don't necessarily lead into secure jobs. Her current
part time job in Topshop seems to give her more of a feeling of security
than the prospect of university at the moment, and that says something as
her job there is as precarious as they come."
The Guardian, 03/07/12
Daniel Mark Fogel & Elizabeth Malson-Huddle (Eds.): 
José Carlos Bermejo Barrera: Rectores, promotores y profesores: La batalla perdida de la Universidad Pública
