Are Tuition Fees Really That Important?

With the fuss made by rival politicians and student's unions, you'd be forgiven for thinking this was the most vital issue of our age. It's not.

Do fees really hurt students?

As a student, I can't say that the rise in tuition has affected me at all. That's because the fees don't affect students: they affect graduates.

You don't pay to go to university, you are taxed because you once did. They aren't student fees, they are graduate fees. Whilst it is rhetorically convenient to act like it is the poor vulnerable students who have to pay, that's simply not true. The only people paying back the full £9,000 a year, through a small percentage of their income, are rich, successful graduates.

Most of us won't pay the full amount back, and because the system is progressive the increase only really affects high-earners. Cutting fees will therefore cut tax for the rich most of all, which is the sort of policy we accuse the Tories of wanting to sneak through. Call it left-wing all you like; cutting a progressive tax will mean a transfer of money to the wealthiest amongst us.

Thanks to our sensationalist press, the fee increase was initially predicted to prevent any poor people from going to university. That hasn't happened: university attendance has increased with this increased funding, and we have more students from disadvantaged and majority groups than ever before. This is because the fees do not affect students, with nothing to be paid up front. They will hit us slightly when we begin our careers in jobs with a decent income, but they don't hurt us at all at the student stage of our life cycle.

It's other things which make the cost of university hard. Student maintenance loans do not cover our rent, let alone living expenses. As someone from a household not poor enough to get more then the minimum loan but not rich enough that my parents subsidise me, I've stayed alive through scholarships, part-time jobs, and an extremely austere lifestyle (what do you mean, you spend more than £10 a week on food?). Others find it even harder. We need to make it affordable to attend university, not just to apply.

As students we should be pushing for more financial support to actually live here, the availability of more affordable accommodation and more work. These are also problems faced by graduates, who struggle to get on either the housing or career ladder, but that's not what we complain about. All we can talk about, in every chance we get to have politician's ear, is tuition fees.

We should be pushing for a better value of education, for universities to use this funding not just for their research but to help us graduate in the best possible position rather than only having a few contact hours a week, but that's not what we ask for. All we focus on is tuition fees, as if they have the remotest impact on our day-to-day lives.

The tuition fee policy has hurt the government, both in the sense that they've lost support over the backlash and that they probably won't get most of their loans back, but students aren't the victims here. Some well-paid graduates in the future will bear part of the cost, but only when they can afford it. In an economy where everyone is having to learn to cut back, that's really not too much to ask.

Do we deserve a government bankroll?

This is the real question. If we see ourselves as entitled to a free ride as the default, anybody removing that hand-out seems like they are harming us. If we take paying for the things we use as a default, though, as it is in most sectors, the question changes: are we entitled to this free ride? That's not clear.

Let's be real about the financial situation of this country. Over the past five years the government has been cutting everything: hospitals, schools, welfare for the most in need. We are just part of that need to balance the books. Why do some students we think we alone should be excepted?

Sure, it's important that the government invest in the next generation. They do: they pay for our tuition, we just have to pay some of it back if we reach success on the back of it. When an investment pays off, you can't begrudge investors some dividends. That doesn't seem like the world's biggest injustice.

Going to university is an alternative to working full-time, productively contributing to the economy, or being unemployed. As a society we criticise job-seekers on benefits, taking money from the taxpayer without contributing for themselves, but is looking for work a worse way to spend tax revenue than getting drunk and occasionally reading some philosophy? Without tuition fees, students would be recipients of thousands of pounds of government hand-outs, and that sort of expenditure needs to be justified.

That's not always easy. There's recently been news of a course in Doctor Who, joining modules in Harry Potter studies as a complete waste of money. Even more conventional degrees, like Creative Writing, often don't contribute to the economy at all, with most of their attendees failing to find employment in that field.

Many of us are just here for our own interest and development, curious about literature or history. That's fine, and it's laudable that you'd seek to expand your horizons, but don't expect the taxpayer to foot the bill. The government wouldn't pay for me to hire a piano tutor or attend dance classes; why should they pay for me to study Kantian ethics? That's not the same as teaching a schoolchild basic numeracy. We are adults, we chose to take these optional courses, so it's not asking much to expect us to pay.

It's not only the courses which can be questioned as investments, but the students themselves. Many of us are here for the university experience, don't work hard on our degrees, and barely scrape passes. That's fine, if campus life is what makes you happy, but expecting the government to pay for your attendance is no better than expecting them to pay for your drinks. Neither investment helps them, or the British taxpayer, in any way.

Perhaps, on top of providing more bursaries and support for the disadvantaged to attend university as suggested above, the the government should incentivise the sort of graduates they need by offering scholarships for high performers in those subjects in which there is a skills gap, such as in STEM degrees. That would be investing in the future. Paying for literally anybody to take any course, though, is not a sensible investment in any sense. People should be free to study viking texts if that interests them, but forgive the government if they don't see it as an economic priority.

Yes, it would be nice if everything was free, but ultimately politics occurs in a context of limited resources, and every potential government expenditure needs to be weighed against its rivals. If you want the government to spend billions of pounds on your degrees, that's billions of pound that go out of the education budget to support more necessary forms of education. It takes a certain level of entitlement to believe that, in a society where all other sectors face cuts, we alone deserve more of the taxpayers money.

Even asking for this free ride takes a notable amount of gall, but to make it our number one priority, to act like asking us to pay for what we use is the biggest scandal of our age, is deeply irresponsible. There are many funding issues which affect students and young people today, but tuition fees are not one of them, let alone important enough that we ignore all of the others.

We do not support parties in delivering assistance for disadvantaged schoolchildren, delivering jobs and apprentices, building affordable housing; we only criticise them for not removing tuition fees, because that's where we'd rather the limited money be spent. Is that going to make life better for us? I don't find this attitude at all helpful.

It only succeeds in making us look spoilt, as young people who have not had to pay for anything growing up and naively expect this to continue. Acknowledging political realities, and pressuring for policies to help us in the here-and-now, would be much more productive.