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Why it’s nonsense to say that education should be free

For some reason, almost every day I receive a Facebook invitation to a march somewhere in London to protest against austerity and to support free education. I must confess I’ve never been a huge believer in mass street demonstrations. I somehow feel politics should be done deliberately and rationally, not with balaclavas and smoke bombs. Ultimately, though, I don’t really care. I think it is a shame that police attention is diverted and public money unnecessarily spent, but if you want to spend your weekend holding a ‘F*ck the Tories’ banner somewhere in London, go on and have fun. What does interest me, however, is this whole narrative of ‘free’ education.

I don’t think the people who support the ‘Free Education’ movement actually believe education should be free. They probably (hopefully?) realise that building and maintaining lecture theatres costs money, that tutors must be paid and that books and test tubes don’t come for free. So I presume that what they mean is that our tertiary education shouldn’t be paid for by us, the students, but rather from general taxation, that is, from everyone’s taxes. That way, we get a free ride, and someone else ends up paying for our education.

I truly do wonder: what is fairer about a working bloke in the opposite corner of the country paying for my shiny Oxford degree? Or alternatively, what is fairer about borrowing more money, so that my grandchildren (if I were planning on having any) have to pay for it? Sure, having a good degree is by no means all about money, but to deny that studying PPE at Christ Church will probably help me earn some dollar later on would be silly. Does it not make sense I should contribute a little and pay for this comparative advantage myself?

It is also a popular narrative to say that higher tuition fees put a huge number of people off applying. It only takes one brief look at the publicly available data to realise this is simply not true. There was a very small drop in the number of applicants in 2012, but the number grew in 2013 and grew further still in 2014 – there were just under 600,000 applicants, compared to about 450,000 in 2007. What’s really interesting is that the number of applicants from the lowest income bands is growing the fastest. This is because universities can now offer more scholarships and grants to those applicants.

Look at what’s happening in Scotland. Scottish students are being squeezed out by huge numbers of EU applicants who – unlike the English – also get ‘free’ education. Thus, rather than levying fees and directing bursaries and scholarships to able kids from deprived backgrounds, the progressive Nationalists double down in a middle-class giveaway.

Unlike in the USA, the generous public loans in this country mean that no applicant who is smart enough will decline her university offer just because she doesn’t have enough cash. To campaign for ‘free’ education has become a totemic mantra, but frankly I just don’t buy it.

For the time being, I’m glad the government pays for my education, and when I start earning money, I’ll happily contribute my fair share for the enormous privilege of studying at a British university. 

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