"Facts on fees and the fallacies of ‘fairness’" by James Vernon

A photo from the "I wouldn't be here!" (if tuition fees were raised) photo campaign by students supporting the University of Kent Occupation, the last UK student occupation standing and intending to keep going through the festive season. Please support the students in any way you can. Here are links to their Facebook page and Twitter feed

DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES republishes James Vernon's article "Facts on fees and the fallacies of ‘fairness’", first published at openDemocracy.net on December 19, 2010:

What is the real nature of the government's legislation on higher education; what will be the consequences; and what relationship does it have to reducing the deficit? An important exchange on this issue is taking place here, between Alan Finlayson and Tony Curzon Price. Now a striking contribution with strong claims has been submitted to OurKingdom.

The Coalition’s narrow victory in the vote on university tuition fees will surely not mark the end of the debate or of student protests. And nor should it.  Despite the Labour Party’s eleventh hour adoption of a position mostly intended to embarrass the Liberal Democrats the level of debate in the House of Commons mainly served to emphasize the poverty of our current parliamentary politics. A greater diversity of opinion and sophistication of argument would be apparent in almost every student union debating chamber.  As Ministers ignore or seek to criminalize protesters they ingeniously insist that they will listen to arguments.  So here are eight facts about fees and their fairness that we have heard remarkably little about.

1. The cut of 80% - with 100% in art, humanities and social sciences – for teaching in the higher education sector is considerably in excess of cuts in other areas of government expenditure.  It is supposed to a save a total of £2.9bn for the exchequer, a paltry figure when compared to other areas of government expenditure.  In the league tables so beloved of our current generation of politicians it places Britain at the bottom of its OECD competitors in terms of levels of public investment in higher education.
2. This draconian cut will not save money for the exchequer in the short term. Any saving will have to wait until students in the class of 2012 pay back their loans which The Independent reports even the Department of Business, Skills and Innovation expects only 25% of them to do so.  So the supposed cut will actually initially increase the size of the deficit. Indeed, the government will need to borrow over £5bn more to provide the initial loans – even though like any good loan shark they’ll be borrowing at rates lower than the 4-5% they’ll be charging students. It is, as David Willets has acknowledged, essentially an accounting trick to enable the government to make sub-prime loans to students with no guaranteed income.  Experience in the US, which remains the government’s model of private provision, suggests that eventually the loans themselves will be privatized to make the system sustainable for the exchequer. 
3. The Coalition insists that most universities will charge £6,000 but, as the independent Higher Education Policy Institute has demonstrated, to survive let alone succeed many will quickly reach for the £9,000 limit.  For the £6000 fee, double what most students currently pay, universities will actually receive less  (about £1300 for most degree programmes).  In any market, even in the artificially created one for higher education, it is unlikely that students will be prepared to pay more for less. While the privileged will remain able to speculate on their futures by investing in premier league degrees, the rest will be forced to pay for second class degrees. As English universities lust for more income to survive or compete globally, and the current fee structure of £6,000 represents a cut in their funding, it is only a matter of time before Vice Chancellors start lobbying government to remove the £9,000 upper limit. At this point it is likely that the government will turn to private loan companies and cheaper private universities with online provision to help fund an increasingly variegated system with new third class degrees that maintain a fig leaf of access while privilege prospers.
4. While the Coalition has been at pains to make £6,000 not £9,000 the headline figure this is not the real cost of a university education, just the tuition cost for one year. At most campuses accommodation, subsistence and learning needs are around £8,000 and in London they are higher still. The real cost of a university education is therefore close to a total of £50,000. Very few people from low-income families, despite all the last minute additions to the current bill, will be able to countenance such an investment in their future.
5. Not all graduates will benefit from speculating on a university education as a private investment by earning substantially higher earnings over their lifetimes – particularly those in the arts and mature part-time students.  And then there are those who drop out.  Again experience in the US suggests that as fees rise and students work other jobs to help offset their loans drop-out rates rise. There is no recognition that university graduates, let alone those who do not graduate, are a diverse group with different life and career trajectories.  Even though these students will only have to repay their loans if their incomes exceed £21,000 many will face a full thirty years of repayment that will surely also negatively impact their ability to raise mortgages and become home-owners.
6. One of the biggest fallacies of the current debate is not just the assumption that only graduates benefit from their higher education but that conversely public investment should only be restricted to those areas of social life that are truly collective and universal in provision.  This is nonsense.  If higher education has become a private good because not all of the population benefit from it then we should follow this logic in to other areas – like unemployment benefit.  Can we really imagine or countenance a system in which unemployment benefit is considered a private good delivered only by way of loans that have to be paid back?
7. We should have no time for the old and familiar argument that there is no alternative.  The graduate tax is a fairer tax on prospective earnings than the proposed system and has been dismissed because the Coalition, and too many universities, insists that there is no way of cooking the books to make it reduce current government expenditure. Yet there are other alternatives.  With 80% of the public supporting a rise in expenditure on higher education an argument for its funding through increased taxation is there to be made by any political party that truly believes in social mobility and public investment in the knowledge economies of the twenty first century.   Given that no such mainstream political party currently exists we could at the very least call for a continuation of the same mixed economy of public and private funding by increasing top-up fees in the hundreds rather than the thousands to offset a cut of 10-20% sustained in other sectors.
8. And, finally, as this vote has been rushed through in the wake of considerable public protests and unease, we should not accept the logic of acting quickly.  There is no state of emergency here. The Browne Report did indeed deliberate at length but its brief was narrow and its proposals have failed to win the support of anyone but the majority of Vice Chancellors. The future of higher education, and the future of our democracy are too important to be vandalized by poorly conceived and badly argued legislation. Vandalism does not just happen on the streets.

 

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Three views on the House of Lords' vote tomorrow on the tuition fees rise

The House of Lords where a vote will take place tomorrow on the tuition fees legislation

An open letter to the House of Lords on tuition fees by William Cullerne Bown

To All Members of the House of Lords
On Tuesday [December 14] you will have the opportunity to either approve or reject the statutory instrument raising the cap on tuition fees charged by universities to £9,000. How well has the government made its case?

Vince Cable began his speech to the House of Commons in the debate on Thursday by saying:

“The instrument represents a central part of a policy that is designed to maintain high-quality universities in the long term, that tackles the fiscal deficit and that provides a more progressive system of graduate contributions based on people's ability to pay.”

This statement accurately reflects the case made in recent weeks by the government for its policy on tuition fees. There are three central planks - that it will reduce the deficit, that it is progressive, and that it is necessary for the wellbeing of universities. But how well are these three claims supported by the evidence? [Read William Cullerne Bown's full letter here)

Excerpt from Lords voting on tuition fees by Lord Knight

By convention we do not reject executive orders.  As the unelected chamber we do not consider that we have the mandate to overturn the executive in that way.

That leaves the Lords with a delicate judgement on Tuesday, if the majority do not support the government’s position.  These changes are not implementing a manifesto commitment, indeed they are in direct opposition to a clear election pledge from one of the coalition partners.  They will increase the deficit not reduce it (see today’s Independent).  On that basis it may be possible to win the argument that this is sufficiently exceptional to overturn the convention. [Read the rest of Lord Knight's column here]

Excerpt from A close vote on tuition fees by Bagehot's Notebook at The Economist

I was taken aback to learn that serious figures in the coalition suspect the tuition fees legislation—in its current form—may never go through.
The reason? There are two houses of parliament, and the upper House of Lords is a place with strong ideas about doing the right thing and curbing what their lordships identify as government folly and excess. [Read more at Bagehot's Notebook]

What happened on Thursday

December 9^th 2010 saw the UK parliament pass into legislation the right for universities to charge up to £9,000 per annum tuition fees for undergraduate courses.  It also witnessed another day of student and staff protest in London and elsewhere, with an estimated 30,000 demonstrators.  Again the vast majority of protest was entirely peaceful, intelligent, and inspiring. [Martin McQuillan, The English Intifada and the Humanities Last Stand]

Members of the DEFEND the ARTS and HUMANITIES Facebook group  joined last Thursday's protest in London against the rise in tuition fees, stage one of the coalition government's move to 'fully marketise'/privatise the English higher education system. 

Below is a moving account of the protest by one of our group's members. Further eloquent accounts can be found here at the letters' page of The Guardian. And you can also view philosopher Nina Power's photographs of last Thursday's protest here.

This entry is particularly dedicated to Alfie Meadows, a Philosophy student at Middlesex University, studying in a department that has already been condemned by cuts.  The UK Police watchdog (Independent Police Complaints Commission) is currently investigating Thursday's events after 20-year-old Alfie was left with bleeding on the brain by a police truncheon. There's a video about what happened to him here.

Alfie, we salute you, and other protestors, for your courage in placing yourself on the frontline of the democratic, lawful defence, that day, against the attacks on our education system and rights. We wish you a speedy recovery. There will be a peaceful protest about what happened to Alfie in London tomorrow.

What  Happened on Thursday
 Emma Jackson


On Thursday I went to demonstrate against the proposed increase of tuition fees, the abolition of EMA [the Education Maintenance Allowance] and massive cuts to higher education. I ended up being held against my will, firstly in Parliament Square and then on Westminster Bridge. Other people had worse experiences than mine, I was not hit by the police or charged at by horses but I regard what happened to us as a form of police violence. What follows is my account of the day. 

So where to start? I could start at ULU at 12 when we arrive at the demonstration. It’s noisy and big and heartening. My friend Hannah, who is not famed for punctuality, wants us to get there in time to hear Jarvis Cocker speak at the rally. I don’t know if he did or not, we could hear some voices in the distance that sounded amplified but it could’ve been anyone. Maybe I should start at Westminster, because that’s the bit you want to know about but the bit between ULU and Westminster is a happy, lovely protest and should be mentioned. The sun is shining and the people are in good voice. The SOAS salsa band provides a rhythm. We go past loads of riot police at Waterloo bridge, all wearing their cheery blue baseball caps, as if to say ‘yeah, we’re fun kind of guys…’, clad in exoskeleton, helmets in hand. We don’t go down Whitehall but round the back past St James Park. Then we’re there at Westminster. A crowd gather round the SOAS band and have a dance. I break off and go to a café on Whitehall to get a coffee and use the toilet. Not much to report.

I bump into my friends Andy and Sara. The mood is still good, a few daft young lads are walking about, posturing with their bits of balsa wood from the placards, but come on, balsa wood…  Shortly after this, someone throws a burning bottle in the direction of the police. He is restrained by demonstrators. The police appear to be sealing off the exits and we start to think about leaving. This is the first part of how being kettled effects you, the thought of not being allowed to leave makes you want to leave. We edge over to the exit by the treasury. ‘Can we leave?’ I ask the female police officer in riot gear. ‘There is a full containment’. ‘Oh ok’. We’re stuck.

Time passes. A load of people with a sound system walk towards the treasury, it looks like it might kick off so we walk away. Two lads stripped to the waist get on people’s shoulders and… it’s a dance off. ‘I can’t believe we just ran away from a dance off’ says Sara. This goes on for a while. At this point it is like being trapped in a really shit festival. People are lighting fires to keep warm and you get that festival smell of burning plastic. My feet are cold. There’s a scuffle at the treasury, some of the dancers are climbing up the walls and we hear the sound of breaking glass. We find what seems like a safe place, a slightly raised island with a big tree on it and a statue. I figure we can’t get charged by horses on here so it seems like a good base. Also on our island are what look like Further Education students, they look freezing and are huddled round a quite pathetic little fire. I go and ask the police near us, who are guarding a street called ‘Little Sanctuary’ (oh the irony!), if we can leave. The police officer says ‘You have been free to leave all along. You can get out at Whitehall’. We do not trust this information but reckon it’s worth a try so we walk over in that direction. A very helpful man in a ‘domestic terrorist’ t-shirt tells us that they have closed Whitehall again. I don’t much fancy the look of what is going on up there, it looks crowded and potentially dangerous. My instinct is that we are better off on our island. Getting home is important, staying safe, more so. We retreat to our little hill. Maybe time for another biscuit.

Then we see the police charging on the crowd for the first time, coming from Whitehall. People are running and shouting and there is some kind of clash at the treasury. We watch from afar but things have changed now, no more shit festival. On parliament green we see a big fire, I don’t know what’s burning but it’s made of plastic. The smoke obscures the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben chimes. It’s all gone a bit heavy metal. More time passes, we eat some of Andy’s wine gum sours. In an outbreak of mass conformation to national stereotype a long orderly queue is forming up to one of the riot police lines. We can see from our vantage point that no one is getting out of there. And we decide that no way are we queuing. Eventually the queue dissolves.

Then people start to move from the treasury nearer to us. A few windows are being smashed in the building we are facing. Maybe it’s time to leave the island. We walk over to the green. Another group of people are huddled around a fire. A riot police officer is talking to them and then comes over to us, visor up ‘Do you want to go home ladies?’ (in a chirpy Yorkshire accent) ‘so do we, just move to that corner there and you can get out.’ Another part of the process, the proverbial ‘good cop’. We walk over to the corner. Again the animal instinct to keep to the high ground is kicking in and Hannah, Andy, Sara and I stay on the wall of the green. Our other pals get further through the crowd and that’s the last we see of them. People are squashing into this corner and no one is getting out. Then someone shouts ‘Is anyone under 16?’ Maybe they have decided that 5 1/2 hours is the appropriate time to keep children penned in, in the freezing cold? A few kids make it to the front and are pulled out. The rest of us wait. At this point there is no agitation, no violence, and no signs of any cameras. The press van has long left the square. The police are forming two lines on the road that goes from parliament to Westminster Bridge. Because we are up high, we keep feeding the information down to the other people. Andy reckons that the police will make us past their lines while they pull out people they think they recognise. It’s happened to him before. It looks like we are getting out.

The police draw back their line slightly and I step down off my wall. I’m a bit squashed, claustrophobic and frightened so I look up at the night sky. The people next to me are singing in Spanish. One girl is having a panic attack and everyone makes way so she can go back to the green. We chat to some of the young people around us. Two lads debate whether to go home before they go out ‘But I’m wearing a Nick Clegg, Dick Head t-shirt, mate. I can’t go out in this!’ You see, we still think we’re going home soon. One woman starts to shout ‘let us out’. ‘This is how it works’, says Andy, ‘now everyone is thinking ‘shut up, we want to go home’ you are, aren’t you? I am’. He is absolutely right, but that’s how it gets to you. Every now and again people shout ‘let us out, let us out’. I’m not sure how long we are held in this spot, time has gone weird. And then some real movement. We are indeed directed through the police lined street. I think we’re out and it’s like the demo has started again ‘No ifs, no buts, no education cuts’ and the chant ‘We’ll be back. We’ll be back’ loud and clear. What I am thinking in my head as I walk hand-in-hand with Hannah past the riot police is ‘shame, shame on you’. But I don’t shout because I’m cold and frightened. I try and look as many as I can in the eye. One guy with a megaphone (American accent) is saying to the police ‘Can I say, you all look FABULOUS, I just LOVE what you’re doing with those visors right now.’

It looks like they’re letting us go over Westminster Bridge. But then it stops. I talk to an ex-student of mine who has been pushed to the ground twice today in the police charges. There is a police line in front that isn’t moving. This is not good, I think. We are on a bridge over a massive river. Picture Westminster Bridge, if you know it, the barriers on the sides are fairly low. If it kicks off on here, I think, someone is going in the river. The police are also behind us. Keep in mind all these police are in full riot gear. Their faces are mostly covered. They are wearing helmets and they have big round plastic shields in front of them. But there is no conflict. The odd outburst of ‘let us out, let us out’. Some protesters start doing the hokey cokey to keep warm and then the Macarena. Then they go and do the dances for the police. There are now three lines of police backlit by the lights of their vans and the houses of parliament and a load of peaceful protestors some of whom are doing the hokey cokey. A bizarre scene.

I am worried about the vans. Maybe they will put us all in the vans. Surely that’s illegal? But surely this is illegal? The rules seem to have left the building. I see a friend who is working as a legal observer. She has seen a girl with a bald patch at the front of her head where the police have pulled her by the hair. She has also seen people getting beaten up at the treasury. She thinks we may be here for some time.

Two hours later, they start to let people off the bridge. They funnel us through another police line and we are let out one at a time. You have to walk in single file through a corridor of police in riot gear. One of them shines a bright light in my face and asks me to remove my hat. They are filming us. It is at this point that I get upset. I think to myself ‘do not show them any weakness’ but I have to admit, I am a bit teary. Me and Hannah walk past about 100 metres of solid riot police and then another 50m of normal police. We find Sara and Andy and cross the Hungerford Bridge, full of normal people, doing normal things unaware of what has just happened.

We were kettled for 8 hours. What will stay with me is the sight of those backlit police lines on the bridge and the sound of the song ‘if you think this is illegal, clap your hands’.