ON Monday, Labour education secretary Bridget Phillipson announced that university tuition fees will be increased for the first time in eight years.
Phillipson’s increase means that the cost for full-time students at English universities will go up to a maximum limit of £9,535 a year.
At the same time, she announced an increase in the maximum maintenance loans students can access for living away from home and studying in London to a maximum of £13,762 a year.
Making the announcement, Phillipson made the usual excuses Labour ministers make when they heap more poverty on workers and young people, saying: ‘It’s a difficult decision but a necessary one’ adding: ‘It’s no good encouraging young people to go to university if their institutions continue to be in financial peril.’
In fact, an estimated 40% of UK universities are not so much ‘in peril’ as bankrupt and facing the prospect of being forced to close down.
The Labour government now intends to keep these bankrupt universities from collapse by increasing tuition fees while increasing the amount of debt students will be forced to take on in order to keep universities going and guarantee the huge pay levels enjoyed by their vice-chancellors.
The figures on the average student debt for last year stood at a massive £45,600 per student and this debt is set to increase dramatically under Labour’s policy of making students pay to keep universities from collapse by imposing massive debt burdens on them.
The National Union of Students (NUS) in a press release actually ‘celebrated the increase in maintenance loans’ with NUS vice president Alex Stanley commenting: ‘Students are being asked to foot the bill to literally keep the lights and heating on in their university buildings and prevent their courses from closing down.’
The NUS is trying to have it both ways, supporting the increase in debt for students while offering a criticism that students are paying the cost of the economic collapse in higher education.
The response of Jo Grady, general secretary of the University College Union (UCU), was scathing: ‘The proposed hike in tuition fees is both economically and morally wrong. Taking money from debt-ridden students and handing it to overpaid underperforming vice-chancellors is ill conceived and won’t come close to addressing the sector’s core issues.’
Grady went on to say that the model of student fees and loans to finance higher education ‘is broken, it has saddled students with decades of debt, turned universities from sites of learning into corporations obsessed with generating revenue, and continually degraded staff pay and working conditions.’
When Keir Starmer was standing to replace Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader in 2020 he pledged to abolish tuition fees – a pledge, that like all the rest, was abandoned this year in order, he said, to ‘prioritise’ bringing down NHS waiting lists.
In fact, the Royal College of Nursing general secretary Professor Nicola Ranger stated that far from bringing down waiting lists this increase would further ‘make a bad situation worse’.
She said: ‘Today’s announcement will discourage more people from joining the profession. That means fewer highly-skilled staff on wards and in communities’ adding: ‘The tuition fee model has proven to be an unmitigated failure for nursing education, punishing students with high levels of debt whilst driving down the numbers entering the profession.’
Students will reject the position of the NUS that increasing debt to bail out universities that have been turned from places of education into corporate money-making institutions is to be ‘celebrated’.
The right to free education was a right won by the whole working class and today it must be defended by the mobilisation of the entire working class in a general strike to bring down the Labour government and bring in a workers’ government and a socialist planned economy.
Among the first actions of a workers government will be to abolish all tuition fees, cancel all student debt and restore student grants that were abolished by the then Labour government in 1999.
This is the only way to defend the right to free education – join the WRP and Young Socialists to organise the struggle for the victory of the British Socialist Revolution.