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EDITORIAL Education should be viewed as a common good, not a commodity

IF WE didn’t live in a class-divided society then tuition fees for university students and the rents charged for student accommodation would not be an issue. 

In fact, a socialist utopian, looking backwards to our primitive era might ask the question, why were students charged tuition fees? 

Why were they not granted enough money to support themselves through higher education and why did universities charge them for accommodation?

Was not their education an unqualified collective good? Would they not contribute to the development of society with their value-added labour and expertise?

When everything is monetised it has become conventional to view education as a commodity. 

Universities compete in a marketplace for students and the cash train that they bring, while the market itself is rigged.

Eighty-five per cent of sixth-form students in fee-paying schools go on to university, while the top universities conventionally have fewer than 5 per cent of their students from white working-class backgrounds. 

The proportion of black students at these Russell Group universities is not categorised by class so clearly, but as a group they do no better.

The reality is that whether young people get a tertiary level education, where they study, how they study and their prospects after finishing university are crucially dependent on their family background, what their parents do for a living, where they live and whether or not their family already includes graduates.

Tony Blair’s first New Labour government first introduced tuition fees in 1998. Students had to pay up to £1,000 a year, depending on their parents’ income. 

The Tory-Lib Dem coalition ramped up fees to a maximum of £9,000 a year from the 2012-13 academic year and it continues to creep up.

There is much academic discussion about whether the introduction and steady increase in the level of fees has contributed to the further exclusion or relative growth of the number of working-class students in higher education. 

This issue still resonates and is given extra force by the greatly devalued education that students experience in Covid-19 crisis conditions.

Students are taking matters into their own hands. After two weeks of a strikingly innovative — and socially distanced — occupation, Manchester students forced the university authorities into conceding a 30 per cent rent reduction. 

Student leader Hannah Philips says the £12 million payout is the largest-ever win for a university rent strike. 

She says burdensome £9,000 student fees are a big problem for students who see their job prospects dwindle while they face a heavy debt burden. 

“Of course these issues bear down especially on working-class students but for all students they are a constant worry and this is the background to student anger.” 

Meanwhile overseas students, who pay up to a whopping £38,000 in annual fees, face the same situation as their British fellow students in finding part-time work to supplement their incomes few and far between, while many are now dependent on foodbanks simply to get through the winter.

Labour MP Claudia Webbe has initiated a cross-party letter pressing the government to scrap tuition fees and cancel student debt during the coronavirus pandemic. For good measure it calls for a refund of rents.

If our government insists that universities must live in a capitalist marketplace then they should live by market rules.

But what an inefficient, morally bankrupt and socially unjust system it is.

Working-class power and socialism would open up higher education to all our young people, enable them to contribute to the collective good, secure in the knowledge that their children would have the same opportunities as any other. 

This is not a utopian notion but an absolute necessity.

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