Absurd student debt has ended mass inclusion – our future is at risk

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."

Original Article
Source: guardian
Author: Nina Power