25 August 2011

Why Should I Pay for You to go to University

At a time when soaring tuition fees and graduate debt lead both school leavers and financial advisors questioning whether or not a degree is worth the cost, when the UK's economy faces rising competion from highly-skilled workers in China and India - the so-called Global Skills Race - perhaps the real question we should be asking is not whether the taxpayer should fund higher education, but can we afford not to.
This article really gets to the heart of why the way the tutition fees debate is almost always framed in the British media (i.e. education is nice but can we afford it?) is completely wrong. Having an uneducated population costs a society much more in the long run, otherwise why doesn't the government save billions of pounds by closing all state schools? Or is the flaw in that plan obvious? But government policy is not made in the 'national interest' (I don't believe such a thing really exists, the CEO of a FTSE 100 company does not have the same interests as the woman who cleans his office), but rather in the interests of those forces best positioned to influence the state, and those forces nowadays (increasing banks, financial institutionals, multinational corporations and arms/military companies) do not have the same interests as the general population. Just look at the financial crisis the Western world has been in for years now. You're telling me the people responsible for causing and refusing to resolve this crisis have the interests of the general population of their societies at heart?

No comments: