How long can it stay open to the multitudes?

This summer I was lucky enough to visit two very different countries. The only immediate similarity I can think of is that they were both in their own way superlative: India, the world’s largest democracy; and Belarus, ‘Europe’s last dictatorship’ (according to Condoleezza Rice). However, symptomatic of my cultural nosiness, as I travelled through these countries I made a point of speaking with as many of their students as I could. It was from these conversations that another similarity arose – that despite my admiration of many aspects of these foreign cultures they each inspired in me a great pride in Britain.

My pride was thankfully not too predictable. I wasn’t having thrills about our civilised tea parties or tripping on a patronising diagnosis of their political systems. I was proud of British universities.

I know it sounds obvious, but sometimes you need a harsh juxtaposition to prove what you already knew. The British university system is incredible. I spent my summer meeting people struggling to earn enough money to pay their tuition fees, with no idea how they’d afford somewhere to sleep for the duration of their course. I met people who, although they were lucky enough to get a bank loan for their course, their projected salary wouldn’t allow them to pay it off unless they worked well into their 50s. And in each of these conversations I’d reflect that Britain, for all its faults, has a true gem of a system.

In Britain, I’d tell my new friends, the government pays most of everybody’s fees. Then they lend you enough to pay the rest, and then enough to live on as well. They don’t charge you interest, and then you only pay them back once you’re earning enough money. In Britain, I declared, anyone can afford to go to university.

Here I’ll insert a quick disclaimer. Yes I was idealising the situation a little. I know that I was ignoring the thousands of extenuating circumstances that make university finance impossible for many, and the inadequacies of the system in dealing with those, but in theory at least my point was true.

Unfortunately on returning to Britain my pride was damaged somewhat as I picked up a paper to read an editorial on rising tuition fees. The talk about fees of up to £7000 had been circulating for quite a while, but as I say, sometimes it takes a juxtaposition…

When I first read about the prospect of £7000 tuition fees two thoughts immediately entered my mind. They were both disgustingly selfish, but my point requires that I’m honest, if somewhat embarrassed. The first was ‘it won’t affect me’, which was and remains true. The second was ‘the system hasn’t changed, everybody still just pays it back, it just takes a little longer’.

The problem is that’s easy for us to think as we sip our Whittard’s tea whilst suiting up for dinner at the Randolph – the next stage in McKinsey’s long courtship of our Oxford-educated souls – but it’s not about us. We’re not the ones it affects. It affects the prodigiously intelligent 17 year old sitting at his kitchen table, weighing up university on one hand, and working to help his family on the other. For him, who has never encountered numbers like £7000 before, the thought of wasting that on education is synonymous with obscene. After a PWC recruitment dinner we can easily throw around figures like £7000 in the context of our future salaries, but there are tens of thousands of people who simply can’t comprehend building up that much debt in a year. And it is not right that we should exclude them from university simply for fear of the debt.

Beyond this though, there is a concern that I find personally even more worrying. The higher the cost of university, the less people who will be willing to study for studying’s sake. The entire concept of rising tuition fees is premised on an assumption that a degree increases your future earnings thus allowing you to pay off larger and larger future debts. The beauty of the old free system, and even the £3000 system to an extent, was that it was possible to study an abstract subject purely for the love of it, and then leave to stack shelves in Tesco forevermore. Learning wasn’t linked to earning, and it shouldn’t be. Oxford was not built as a service station on the route to wealth, rather it is part of the road to knowledge.

When I applied to come here my teachers drilled one thing into me, you won’t get in unless you’re applying for the love of your subject - and I truly was. I learned to love every aspect of my utterly useless degree, and treasure the understanding it gave me. That love should be an end in itself. Extortionate fees, in my mind, devalue a university education and enshrine it as a means to a more valuable end – that high earning job.

It is for these reasons that I implore the decision-makers not to throw tuition fees up to such ludicrous heights. And if they listen then I vainly hope that in a few years time I will once again travel to some superlative country and tell tales that in Britain, anybody can engage themselves in a glorious land of learning for learning’s sake – at a palatable and affordable rate.