Young Labour voted against supporting the free education demo, but the debate on tuition fees has been reopened

Last night Young Labour voted on whether or not to come out in support of the free education demonstration set to take place on the 19th November. Reports suggest, they voted against the motion. This result could easily be interpreted as another sign that the argument against tuition fees is dead in the water. In reality, it tells us that opposite is true.

The very fact that this was a topic for discussion at Young Labour’s national committee, that there will be a demonstration in November, and that the National Union of Students are backing the demo (the first they have since November 2012), shows that after sixteen years of tuition fees, not everyone is convinced by this supposed rational approach to university funding.

As Germany abolishes fees altogether, and as the world watched as students across Chile launched sustained protest over two years for free education (and further protest over education reforms also took place earlier this year), the orthodoxy protecting the very concept of tuition fees looks like it could start to crumble. Yet since he suggested he would cut fees from £9,000 to £6,000, Miliband has been relatively silent on the subject. If he wasn’t already, he needs to have a long, hard think about whether tuition fees are really the fairest way to fund university education.

They’re not.

One of the biggest problems with university tuition fees is that when the Blair Government stepped off the solid ground of free university education, they put the country on a steep funding slope, which over time we’ve subtly been nudged down. Fees, introduced under Blair in 1998 began at £1,000 a year, then two years after pledging in their 2001 manifesto that they wouldn’t introduce top-up fees, the Blair Government passed legislation (by 5 votes)allowing universities to set their own tuition fees up to a cap of £3,000 a year. By 2006 almost all universities had set their fees at £3,000.

Then came the Coalition. In 2012, the cap was tripled, resulting in most universities charging students £9,000 a year.

Why does this slide further into the quagmire of tuition fees matter?

The trebling of fees to £9,000 a year has had a significant impact on the numbers of young people going to university – in the first year since these higher fees were introduced there was a 17% fall in the number of first year undergraduates.

But, it’s not just about the ‘demand’ for university education. Although evidence showed the introduction of fees didn’t discourage students from poorer backgrounds from going to university, the fee-driven model for university education sustains our unequal society. As Danny Dorling explains, our current system favours the 1% (a prime example of the kind of inequality Milband claims he’s taking on). For the economically poorest students, their maintenance grant is £65 a week. In most UK cities, this isn’t enough to survive. So it stands to reason that many poor students take up jobs in order to pay their way, potentially putting them at a disadvantage compared to those who can afford to focus more time on their studies.

The unfairness of the system goes beyond our university years. For those students whose parents can afford to pay for their fees upfront, upon leaving university, they are in a better position than their peers who are saddled with £27,000 debt. Research also proves that fees don’t stop with £27,000. As Dorling explains “outstanding debt on UK student loans goes up every year in line with the retail price index (RPI), and then is increased by up to 3% more” –  meaning that according to the the government’s own loan repayment calculator those who have a starting salary of £26,000 – a £50,000 loan would eventually cost £166,150. It is not fair that those whose families can’t afford to pay for their education have hefty amounts of debt to pay off, while their wealthier counterparts are debt-free. And this doesn’t even touch upon the impact of increasing fees on part-time students and mature students, who are put off from going to university by the prospect of ever mounting debt.

Alongside perpetuating inequality, this system is economically nonsensical. Private loans could end up costing the public purse more than it saves. As many students leave university and go into low paid work, more graduates fail to pay back the fees, debts have to be written off, and because the state underwrites these loans the cost of future government could be higher than savings. It was no understatement then, when Sally Hunt, the general secretary of the University and College Union dubbed the system a “disastrous mess”

Nor is this just about the cost to undergraduates. Although it’s largely ignored, research shows that between 2003-4 and 2008-9 postgraduate fees have risen by 31.8%. This same study found that because of rising fees students from “the lowest socio-economic groups” only made up 4% of students who went on to postgraduate degrees over that same time frame – meaning that many are priced out of postgraduate education altogether.

The discussion around higher education isn’t solely about fees: it’s about the direction in which our education system is going. The marketisation (or privatisation, if you like) of UK’s higher education institutions has turned universities into businesses. This ‘model’ doesn’t benefits students, turning them into consumers instead of learners; nor has it proven beneficial for teaching staff, who, facing pressures to teach ever-growing class sizes and churn out research that will bring in money, complain of unmanageable workloads, stress and insecurity.

Despite efforts to kick the subject into the long grass, the discussion of reducing fees – or even, dare I say, eventually abolishing them altogether – is on the agenda once again. If Miliband is the internationalist he claims to be, he need only look at the global stage – and compare developments in places like Germany to hints of bubbling ferment at home – to see that our current model is broken and that now is a time when we could use a dose of his ‘radicalism’.