It was always going to be open to ridicule. “What do we want?” “An end to student fees?” “When do we want it?” “About a quarter to two, when we finally drag ourselves out of bed, nursing a hangover to watch Ready, Steady, Cook while wrapped in a duvet.”
So, ridicule, yes – but not outrage. No one, especially not the Metropolitan police it seems, expected the massed marching students to turn as violent as they did when they reached Conservative Party Headquarters.
There was some subsequent speculation that the trashing was the work (if that’s the right word) of the small minority of troublemakers that often plagues peaceful protests. But even if that were the case, it hardly matters. As Aaron Porter, the highly articulate president of the National Union of Students recognised, the nature of the protest will have lost the students much public sympathy.
That is a shame as there is something worth attending to in the student protests. Facing fees and debts that their parents and grandparents never had, being actively encouraged to head to university, and now picking up part of the tab (as they see it) for an economic crisis in which they played no part, it is not surprising that many students feel angry and betrayed.
That recognised, there are powerful arguments on the other side, most commonly expressed in the question: is it right for non-graduates to pay for graduates’ education, when the former usually earn far less than the latter?
Lurking beneath the debate is the deeper question of how we should understand education (a topic that will be addressed in a forthcoming Theos report by Trevor Cooling), or, more specifically, what is higher education for? Is it a public investment, as we believe primary and secondary education to be? Does it contribute to the common good, in the way that teaching everyone to read, write and do maths does? In which case, we should all pay for it.
Alternatively is it a private good? Is it effectively a private investment on which the individual can expect private remuneration later on in life? In which case, the individual should cough up.
The categories are not mutually exclusive. It is quite possible to see university education as both a public good and a private investment, a view that would lead one to the part public-funded, part private-funded situation we are heading towards.
What is newsworthy about this whole story, aside from the violence and outrage, is the way in which the new policy signifies a decisive shift from the public to the private argument. We may say that we want half of all young people to attend university in order to enrich and strengthen our society, but such warm noises are not matched by a willingness to pay for them. Our default position seems to be that higher education is a private investment before it is a public good.
If higher education alone were experiencing the pain of this shift from public to private, students would not only have cause to protest but some hope of success. As it happens, it is not. Coming between the government’s reluctant agreement to grant prisoners voting rights (in the teeth of public opinion) and Iain Duncan-Smith’s overhaul of the welfare system, touted as the biggest since 1945, what is happening to student fees is nothing more than a sign of the times.
The most interesting questions – why are we shifting from public to private in this way; is the shift a just or an unjust one; and can (or even should) we do anything about it? – remain matters for debate. But that will be limited comfort for those students today who will pay much more for their education than they would have twenty years ago.
Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos.
