Whether or not universities are at risk of going bust is often talked about like a second-order problem. Sure, it’s sad and all, but is it as serious as a local authority going bankrupt? Is anyone actually going to die if non-Russell Group universities can no longer afford to run humanities degrees? Is it the end of the world for students to leave with 150 grand’s worth of debt, instead of 80?
But then one morning, you wake up and think: enough. Successive governments have been staring an entirely predictable calamity in the face for years, doing nothing about it while ripping off an entire generation with ever greater impunity, then masking that incompetence with casual anti-intellectualism and defeatism. OK, maybe saying that out loud doesn’t do an enormous amount to help students, but not saying it makes your blood boil.
Jo Johnson, elevated to the Lords for services to his feckless brother Boris, explained the problem in its broadest terms to an interviewer last week: fees have only gone up £250 in the 14 years since they were first raised to £9,000. Needless to say, this has not kept up with inflation, so degrees that used to be funded for more than they cost – classroom subjects such as history and English – are no longer breaking even. Johnson suggested that significant fee hikes were needed.
Challenged on the fairness of this – that the students of the future will have much more debt – he floated the view that today’s students were actually getting a much better deal than the class of 2012, since their fees had gone down, in real terms. That’s partly true and partly misleading, but before we get to that, let’s just pause to remember that during the years he’s talking about, when fees were held down causing long-term immiseration to the tertiary sector, he was actually minister for universities (2015 to 2018; then again, for about five minutes, in 2019).
There’s a deeper problem than the freeze on fees, and it’s conceptual: an absolute failure to think of students as decent, upstanding citizens. Rather, they’re considered to be cash cows while they’re studying and incredibly lucrative taxpayers once they’ve finished. This was made painfully obvious during Covid, when students were called back to university so they could carry on paying rent, but confined to their quarters by security guards. Would any business treat its customers like that? Of course not. Students aren’t customers and never will be – what kind of purchase needs you to do so much of the work yourself? It’s like Ikea on steroids. They’re framed as customers by the logic of the market, yet treated, in policy terms, like a bunch of protesters, and that was before they even started protesting.
None of the words in this debate mean what they claim to mean. Politicians talk about fees as though students are somehow getting a good deal, and ignore the fact that maintenance loans haven’t kept up with inflation, either, so are almost entirely swallowed by rent. None of these “loans”, incidentally, actually operate as loans: who would take out a mortgage if their interest rates and repayment terms could be changed by the government without any consultation?
Graduates (in England) pay a flat 9% of any income over about £27,000 to clear this loan. So by any practical measure, it’s a graduate tax, but it can never be called that, because then the graduates would start to question why they were paying tax at a rate so much higher than all the other taxpayers. Is it just because they’re annoying, with all their floppy hair and book learning?
All the peculiar disrespect heaped on British students is multiplied by 10 for international ones, who are charged eye-popping fees to cross-subsidise the domestic intake, then pilloried for being foreign.
The truly tragic thing is that universities have always been a source of legitimate national pride – a thing we were good at. Leaving aside the layer of overpaid vice-chancellors, they’re rammed with excellence and civic spirit. Britain could have been university to the world, and still could: but only by axing fees and putting a proper value on students.
• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
