Education is not a commodity

By Jon Wilson / @jonewilson

The student protesters are right. Education is not a commodity. Students want to choose their universities and their degrees. But they shouldn’t have to choose at a price.

Labour’s opposition to Tory education reforms can help clearly define what our movement stands for. But it will only do so if we get our arguments right. We need to listen to what students say both about the importance of choice, and the need to fight the encroachment of the market into higher education.

The debate about tuition fees is an argument about the kind of society we want to live in. The Conservative vision is of a society of individual consumers who calculate the financial costs and benefits of every action, who are happy as a result to pay the market value for their university course throughout their lifetime. Their vision is one in which everything worth doing has a cash tag attached to it. It is a world in which we know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Despite their talk of the ‘big society’, Tory policy is intended to make citizens into selfish individualists. Cutting state funding for university teaching will, they think, force students to become ‘rational’ consumers who buy their degrees at a price they paid back throughout their lives. In this Tory utopia, students are supposed to stop living and learning and become calculating machines instead. Doing a degree becomes a market transaction like any other, a choice based on the financial calculation of cash costs against future monetary returns.

This view of the world is, frankly, weird. It is shared by a small number of policy wonks who think education can be best understood by abstract economic models based on artificial equations. Perhaps the worst indictment of our education system is that it produces people so distant from the way the real world works.

Thankfully, most students live in the real world. Their choices about what to study are partly on the anticipation of a future income, but also on what they like, and how they want to live their lives. Education for this confident, self-willed inquisitive and plugged in generation of 18 year olds is about broadening the mind, learning something different, opening up new perspectives as well as finding a career. Students know that education has value; it’s precisely for that reason they know it can’t be bought and sold.

Against the weird Tory policy wonks, Labour is very clearly on the students’ side. We believe that we achieve more together than we do alone. And we know that everything of value does not have a price.

Labour sees that a university education is an important part of people’s aspirations to get on. But it recognises that when we aspire we want to benefit our families and communities as well as ourselves as individuals. We recognise that students benefit individually from university and should contribute towards the cost of their education, whether through higher general taxes or specific repayments of some kind like graduate tax. But universities are institutions established for the common good, not just the profit of individuals. The bulk of university teaching needs to be funded from the public purse.

Labour’s commitment to the public value of education needs to celebrate the importance of student choice. The mistake – one many Labour politicians have made in the past – is to confuse choice with the market. Markets only work where people can choose between different goods whose prices vary according to supply and demand. In practice, unrestrained market forces diminish our choices. It is the unfettered power of the market that has reduced our choice in supermarket or banks. The marketisation of Higher Education threatens to reduce student choice by shutting down universities and closing courses.

But it isn’t the mechanisms of the free market that will maintain the quality of university education. Like all public services, universities can get better by treating their ‘users’ as citizens not consumers. Labour’s vision of universities should be of places full of people worth listening to. Things should get better because of conversations that make teachers accountable, not through the abstract and artificial exercise of the consumer’s power over the commodity they buy.

The government’s higher education policy is an odd marriage between the Tory right’s ideological commitment to the marketisation of higher education, and an opportunistic attempt to cut university budgets disproportionately because the government can shift the cost onto students.

Labour needs to fight the commodification of higher education with the argument that not everything has a price – but also by showing that the marketisation of universities will not improve student life. This battle for the future of universities allows us to stand up for the power of the citizen against the market. In doing so it enables us to oppose the weird market obsessives who’ve taken over the government. By contrast, it allows us to define Labour as a movement concerned to uphold the human values most people think should rule our education system, and our society as a whole.