Part 1: Neoliberalism

Part 2: Higher Education

Part 3: Future of Sociology

Image courtesy of Kalina Yordanova

The President’s line that ‘now is not the time to make school more expensive for our young people’ has considerable resonance in England where the government’s drastic reduction of direct funding for taught programmes has led to significantly higher tuition fees and the leveraging of university income from future generations of students. English students will, on average, pay the highest university fees of any OECD country, including the USA.

The Coalition has sold this to the public on the basis of a ‘generous’ loan system that provides an income contingent repayment threshold of £21,000 and a favourable interest rate. However, as Andrew McGettigan has argued, these arrangements are not guaranteed, and can be changed by future governments. This is so not only for new cohorts of students, but also for existing holders of student loans.

Now is the time for government to set fixed repayment terms on student loans. Not a slow-jam as powerful as the President’s, and, of course, the real disgrace is the leveraging of university income from future generations of students to protect current taxpayers.

A recent article by Bob Meister sets out how university leaders sought to replace public funding by leveraging income from students. Their argument was similar to that made by Universities UK, that it would enable public universities to compete with private universities. This strategy was predicated on the view that this could be done alongside teaching efficiencies (increased enrolments, use of casualised staff, etc) and that the additional income could be used to augment falling research budgets.

But why would students accept this model? Once again the arguments are familiar to those made by university leaders in the UK. Students should pay because of the graduate premium in incomes. As Meister says, “The core assumption of privatization-as-financialization is that rising income inequality increases the fear of falling behind and thus the willingness of middleclass students to borrow more. If this reasoning is correct, … students should be indifferent to the choice between paying for the education premium up front (as equity) or taking on debt—higher tuition would simply move some students further up what financial economists call the “efficient frontier” between being an investor and being a borrower. … By following the logic of financialization, [universities] could theoretically raise revenues from enrolment growth for as long as [students] were more willing to incur debt than to pay higher taxes.”

However, as Meister shows for the US, there was a significant premium in the early 1990s for the top 20%, but that has not been the case since the late 1990s when all income growth has been in the top 1% (significantly a group in which university leaders are found). The stagnation of ‘middle class’ incomes calls into question such a model. As Meister argues “a potentially greater income gap has appeared among recent college graduates, whose unemployment rate is now approaching the national average. Of those who are employed, 50 percent have jobs that do not require a college degree and that pay on average 40 percent less than jobs requiring a degree.”

At the same time as the system encourages spiralling tuition costs and reduced quality in teaching, it dramatically increases indebtedness. Fear of debt coupled with a perceived lowering of returns to a degree, encourages prospective students, especially those from lower income backgrounds, to enrol at lower cost for-profit providers. Public universities become squeezed between for-profit providers and elite private colleges. Students from low income backgrounds end of paying more for degrees which will do little to advance their social mobility.

This is the system that our university leaders and politicians seek to emulate. Yet, as Howard Hotson has demonstrated, publicly-funded public universities deliver better quality teaching and more equitable outcomes.

Meister’s article makes for bleak reading. There may be no road back. The consequence of high levels of indebtedness is potentially to make populations resistant to tax-based solutions that would ultimately be more beneficial. History will be severe on our university leaders and politicians, who had the evidence before them, but chose to ignore it for a short-term fix to be paid by future generations. The cost is not just financial, it is the undermining of public higher education.

Meister concludes his article with a challenge that is both urgent and compelling:

“Our challenge in resisting privatization is to articulate a vision for higher education that makes it an answer to the problem of growing inequality and debt-servitude rather than a symptom, and increasingly a driver, of that problem… There is no way forward unless the tax revolt, which is now more than three decades old, can be linked to a debt revolt, which is just beginning — and unless both can lead to a renewal of the role of public universities as forces for equality and democracy.”

Striking students in the Canadian province of Quebec are vowing to escalate their fight against an increase in tuition fees after police used tear gas, shock grenades and arrested dozens of protesters this Friday.

For more than ten weeks now more than 170 000 students from approximately 180 local unions have been on an open-ended student strike which has shut down the Port of Montreal, ministerial meetings and nearly all classes in post-secondary education across the province.

Quebec students who pay the lowest tuition fees across Canada are faced with a 75% tuition fee increase. Currently, the average annual cost to attend a Quebec university is $2,519. Even if the planned increase were to go ahead, Quebec students still would pay less than in any other Canadian province.

But student protesters are highlighting the fact that Finance Minister Raymond Bachand’s provincial budget of 2011-2012 will cut public and accessible healthcare, hydroelectricity and education. Ironically, Bachand labelled these ‘sacred cows of Quebecoise society’.

Over the last nine years in power the Liberals have pursued to restructure society in the interest of the rich. Tax cuts for corporations have gone hand in hand with increasing the retirement age to 67. After trade unions suffered a blow in 2005 it was announced that student fees were to increase.

Over the course of five weeks, students engaged in a ‘general strike’ causing significant economic damage to the provincial government. Yet, the majority of the student unions and associations cut a deal with a severely weakened government which had been scarred by two years of continuous opposition by trade unions.

Despite 110 000 out of a grand total of 185 000 striking students rejecting the agreement in their general assemblies the strike was put to an end. With full privatisation looming this time round students do not want to see a repeat of 2005 which saw them go back to class empty-handed.

Students have learnt some important lessons. They are organising on a departmental basis which has strengthened the overall organisation of the strike. This has also helped them to hold the centralised unions to account.

The high point of the ‘Quebec Spring’ has been the 200 000-strong demonstration in Montreal on March 22. On the day, students successfully blocked the Port of Montreal for several hours, a tactic recently used at the Oakland General Strike in November.
More importantly, the two largest public sector unions called their membership on to the streets for the mobilisation. Following the biggest student demonstration ever, students called for a week of economic disruptions bringing inner cities’ traffic to a standstill while also mobilising 30 000 parents in support of the students’ demands.

While the mainstream media claims that the Liberal government has “extended a hand” by offering students an “increased bursary and loan programs” the government is intent on breaking the movement once again. Premier Jean Charest said: “The decision has been made and we will not back down”. This has only strengthened the determination of student strikers, and led them to forge new alliances.

Students are organising solidarity with locked out Rio Tinto Alcan workers and with hundreds of Aveos employees who recently lost their jobs.

Friday’s protests saw environmentalists and students come out together. They stormed the top floor of a conference centre in which Charest was to unveil further details of his ‘Plan Nord’, a mining plan which will see a 1.2-million-square kilometre stretch of indigenous land be sold off to big business.

At the same time, other students stormed a meeting of the federal Immigration minister Jason Kenney for his anti-gay and anti-immigration stances.

While the display of resistance has inspired activists far beyond the provincial borders of Quebec, the movement is confronted with difficult questions. The strike’s success has meant that the return to courses will be at least delayed until mid-June at which point professors will be taking time off from regular teaching. Despite the fact that this means that students will have to retake the academic year and might not be able to graduate, students are clear about one thing: “If the strike continues, students are certain to win the fight”

Photo credit: http://linchpin.ca/English/Qu%C3%A9bec-student-movement-move

There are two versions:
ESOL manifesto leaflet v4b online PDF that can be printed out.
ESOL leaflet v4b online interactive Feb12

The Action for ESOL website can be accessed here: http://actionforesol.org/

Later this month (March), I will finally pay off the student loans I took out in the 1990s. These were maintenance loans, I graduated before the introduction of what were called ‘topup’ fees (at first £1 000 per year), and amounted to just under £5 000 when I finished. It has taken me nearly 14 years to repay that debt.

I enjoyed the protection of the Consumer Credit Act, a low interest rate set in statute, and a generous repayment threshold. In 2009/10, my interest rate was -0.4% – that’s right, I received credit on my outstanding balance. This is because interest was calculated at RPI minus 1 percentage point and RPI had been 0.6% in September 2008.

In 2001, the repayment threshold was £20 696, by 2005 it was £22 764. I was thus able to defer repayment. Once the threshold was crossed, 60 equal monthly repayments were made to clear the outstanding balance. Repayments were tied directly to the amount borrowed.

The advantages and protections of these pre-98 loans persisted even after the balances were sold to the company that became Thesis Servicing.

Since 1998, we have seen many changes in the scheme. The most obvious is the introduction of income contingent repayment loans which means that the monthly repayments are relative to income, rather than initial amount borrowed. The original debt taken can limit the total amount repaid, though it is more likely for most that the debt will be written off (after 25 years after graduation for those with recent loans, 30 years for those taking out the new loans in 2012/13).

What concerns me is not simply the complexity of income contingent repayment loans, but that many of the protections I enjoyed have been removed.

The new loans are not covered by the Consumer Credit Act, interest rates can be set at the discretion of the relevant Secretary of State using secondary instruments, as can the other details of the scheme, such as the repayment threshold (and percentage determining level of repayment). Although the current government has stated its intention to set real rates of interest (ie above inflation) it has given itself powers to set rates much higher than that.

The 2011 Education Act, which received Royal Assent last November, Education Act now allows governments to set up to market rates of interest on student loans using statutory instruments (rates must be “lower than those prevailing on the market, or no higher than those prevailing on the market, where the other terms on which such loans are provided are more favourable to borrowers than those prevailing on the market.”)

Having recognised this lack of statutory and legal protection, what do the terms and conditions of the student loan agreements say?

The clause that currently appears in the 2012/13 “STUDENT LOANS – A GUIDE TO TERMS AND CONDITIONS” allows future administrations great leeway to change terms and conditions.

“You must agree to repay your loan in line with the regulations that apply at the time the repayments are due and as they are amended. The regulations may be replaced by later regulations.” (p8)

It is clear that the loans are not merely income contingent, but future-policy contingent.

With such long lifetimes, much higher debt and higher interest rates, this kind of contingency is unacceptable.

Borrowers should not face such a potential liability. Especially when we recall that student loans can be sold to third parties without consultation and without consent (2008 Sale of Student Loans Act).

I believe that individuals should sign up to loan agreements where the terms and conditions are fixed for the lifetime of the loans (interest rate taper, repayment threshold and percentage of income repaid above the threshold). Future governments may be required to change the terms of the scheme for new cohorts, but those who have taken out already loans should not face the risk of a future government extracting additional levels of repayment.

Who can say what the economy will look like in 15-20 years’ time? With such high levels of government, corporate and household debt in the UK, it is difficult to be confident. Might we in future face problems similar to that of Italy and Greece? If so, we should avoid having a class of citizens, graduates, from whom a technocratic administration can tap extra cash.

Whether such a scenario is likely or unlikely is beside the point – the possibility should be excluded as far as practicable. It would be too easy for a future government, faced with pressing financial difficulties, to return to this group of citizens and extract more repayments from them without the need for primary legislation.

Providing additional protection is the right and proper approach to a generation who now face much higher fees and much higher loan debts.

If you agree, please sign the e-petition here, Set fixed repayment terms in student loan agreements.

A threshold of repayments of £21,000, was argued for by Liberal Democrats as a condition of their support for the raising of tuition fees. However, this threshold can be lowered by any government and applied to existing loan agreements. Indeed, a leading think-tank, Demos, has already recommended lowering the threshold to enable increasing the number of student places without ‘burdening’ the loan support system. The Coalition government has sought to sell the new arrangements as fair because students will only pay if they earn a significant return on their education. However, the loans are, in truth, government-contingent, not income-contingent.

The petition calls on the government to provide student loans with the same protection as other loans. The full text of the petition statement is below. We would strongly urge you to sign it and circulate as appropriate.

Petition

Set fixed repayment terms in student loan agreements
Responsible department: Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

Clauses in Student Loan Agreements allow future governments to vary repayment terms over the thirty-year lifetime of the loans. Borrowers should not face such a potential liability. Those who now face much higher fees and much higher debts should get more contractual protection.

Page 8 of the 2012/13 guide to terms and conditions reads: “You must agree to repay your loan in line with the regulations that apply at the time the repayments are due and as they are amended. The regulations may be replaced by later regulations.”

This clause should be removed.

Agreements should fix the repayment terms for the lifetime of the loans using those with which the scheme was presented to Parliament (interest rate taper, annual income repayment threshold and percentage to be repaid over that threshold).

Without such protection, graduates face the risk that a future government may decide to extract higher levels of repayment than those currently intended.

12-1.30pm: Developing a strategy for defending education
- Understanding the nature of the attacks we face
- Developing effective staff-student networks
- Learning from successful disputes

1.30pm -3pm: March 2012 and beyond: building effective action
- 14 March: NUS walkout and BIS demonstration
- 28 March pensions strike: pickets, protests and rallies
- After 28 March: escalating and deepening the action

The government has withdrawn its Higher Education Bill. Yet changes already underway mean that competition within and between our universities is intensifying. This process requires the driving down of costs, in particular staff costs. Every strike in defence of pensions, jobs, pay and conditions is therefore an act of resistance against marketisation.
On 28 March staff in post-16 education are set to take strike alongside teachers and civil servants. In the run up to the strike, the NUS has also called a week of action for education 12-16 March, including a national walk out on the 14 March. The Education Activist Network is inviting university staff, trade unionists and student activists to a co-ordination meeting on Sunday 4 March to plan for these actions.

The government is already facing a huge backlash against its reforms of the NHS. Its plans for higher education are identical – it wants private providers to be able to feed off public education. Staff and students are already developing local strategies to defend education on their campuses. This co-ordination meeting will provide an opportunity to share these experiences and discuss how we develop an effective strategy uniting the widest possible numbers in defence of the public university.
The government’s own strategy for higher education is in some disarray. It can be defeated. The NUS national student walkout on 14 March and the 28 March strikes provide opportunities for staff and students to build joint action – and networks that can deepen and escalate the action beyond these dates.

EAN co-ordination, Sunday 4 March, 12-3pm, ULU
Malet St, WC1E, Nearest tube Euston or Goodge Street

See here for their Statement of the Initiative for Independent Universities

It’s over a week now (written on 10.2.) from the day that city of Brno witnessed the largest student protest in a very long time. The students’ opposition to reforms is now thus entering new phase. What is currently going on in and what can we expect in the upcoming days?

Before I try to answer these questions, let me sum up the events that we have witnessed in the last couple weeks. We’ll have to start even a little bit further though.

Last year the ministry of education gradually prepared several versions of two draft bills, which are to cause a great change in the way Czech higher education works. The draft bills are controversial for numerous reasons.

Firstly, it’s because, were they adopted, they would limit universities’ autonomy; introduce tuition fees for the first time and damage public higher education in Czech Republic.

Secondly, from the perspective of professional lawyer, they are criticized for very sloppy job that the ministry has done. The drafts are not yet a “paragraph” version; it’s more of a statement of what is to be achieved. However, they are so poorly written that they allow for many conflicting interpretations and as of now can’t be easily translated into precise legal terms.

Last but not least, they are controversial because of the defects in the procedure of the drafting; i.e. the fact that the ministry has not followed legally defined rules that demand that the drafts be discussed with representatives of higher education institutions and has not taken into account at all number of objections.

Since the ministry refused any negotiations at the beginning of this year, the first large protest against such reform took place on Thursday 19^th January in Prague. It was organized by a student independent initiative. On the same they that students protested, the Chancellor of the Charles University in Prague (biggest and one of the two most important universities in the country) summoned the whole university for an assembly where the reform was also rejected.

The very same day in the city of Brno students sent an open letter to the administration of Masaryk University (second largest in CZ) where they asked the university functionaries to start conversation with their students about the reform and demanded that the university clearly states its position towards it and starts communicating more openly.

The day after these two student groups merged as a student Initiative For Independent Universities. The group from Brno, as part of their program for more open communication, organized big discussion meeting on 1^st February which was also attended by the Chancellor of the Masaryk University. On the same day, students from 5 universities of Brno marched together to manifest their discontent.

The Initiative For Independent Universities has become truly nation-wide as other students from other university cities – Ceske Budejovice, Hradec Kralove, Liberec, Plzen – joined as well.

The minister of education has humiliated the top representatives, chancellors, chairmen of academic senates when he called them to his office to give explanation for alleged “promotion of social unrest”. After all he agreed to consult the drafts with them one more time. The meeting has however been cancelled and the substitute date has not yet been scheduled.

What is the situation now? As part of the first protest march in Prague, plan for other protest activities for upcoming weeks has been made public, since it was clear that single march will not be enough. These protest events are very tightly linked to the legislative procedure of the drafts.

The Legislative Council of Government (official body that turns drafts into bills that go into parliament) is scheduled to discuss the drafts on 23^rd Feb. On the 29^th Feb. the drafts are to be discussed by the government. The initiative is therefore organizing the Week of Unrest that will take place beginning on the 27^th Feb.

As of now the preparations for the Week of Unrest are underway. It is going to be a truly nation-wide event. The Initiative coordinates large numbers of volunteers in many university cities that work on promotion of the Week and create the program. In the course of the Week of Unrest, a Protest march and University Night will also take place. These events are planned not to disturb the education too much but rather to raise awareness of the problem and provide some space for discussion. Strikes or sit-ins should not occur. Instead, the Initiative and individual students will organize special lectures, debates, screenings and cultural events. The program is however going to be very different in every city and at every university.

Teaching that matters, Modern Universities Changing Lives
A report for the Million+ Group of Universities by Mark Hadfield, Jaswinder Dhillon, Michael Joplin and Russell Goffe of the Centre for Development and Applied Research in Education at the University of Wolverhampton, Feb 2012, 40 pages.

This report was launched at the University of Greenwich on February10th to the approbation of David Willetts who then went into closed session to discuss their ‘employability skills’ with Greenwich Business students. Professor David Maguire, the new Greenwich VC, compared the various charabancs sketched by Boz in Dickens’ description of the road to Greenwich Fair with the F&HE institutions jostling in the market place for ‘students as consumers’, a term he implored the Minister to stop using. In reply, Willetts excused himself for talking about student finance as being ‘one step away from talking about students as consumers’ but claimed – in response to a plea from the Mayor of the Royal Borough of Greenwich on behalf of its debt-averse working-class school leavers – that fees and loans were ‘not really a conventional debt’ but had ‘all the best features of a graduate tax’. This is his usual line that steals Labour’s clothes of a reduced £6,000 grad-tax. So was his assertion that, given the demographic fall in older teens, UCAS figures showed only a 0.2% decline in 2012 applications! Willetts attributed this to the success of Simon Hughes’ ‘student ambassadors’, while he assured other doubters HEFCE had made available an additional £40m. for post-graduates while international students ‘may now stay on at graduate level jobs’ though ‘not in a shop or something’! He reassured others in the audience about disabled access but could only answer a call to stop changing financial arrangements with the promise of ‘a new announcement’ relating to ‘further flexibility’ that would embrace FE colleges as well as ‘external providers’.

However, Willetts’ was hardly discomforted by Pam Tatlow, Chief Executive of Million+, whose report he declared ‘matches the White Paper [in] putting teaching and learning at the heart of the student experience’. The report was introduced with a video of talking heads from Wolverhampton, Derby, East London and Leeds Metropolitan Universities seamlessly discoursing on their student-centred approach as a model to the sector as a whole in prioritising teaching over research to encourage reflective practice upon transferable employability skills. And so the report goes on, following a warning in the introduction that the White Paper’s student number controls ‘have the potential to reduce the unit of resource’ (p.2) after institutions have struggled so long ‘in expanding academic provision while maintaining the quality of teaching and learning’ (p.4). As the report indicates, Modern Universities have expanded proportionately more at all levels than their rival university groupings whose approaches are research- and discipline-centred rather than student-centred. ‘This means that students have to be more than consumers… They must instead be partners in learning’ (p.6).

What this means in practice is exemplified throughout the report in boxed descriptions of ‘students as e-champions’, acquiring ‘action learning sets’ on ‘modules that embed employability skills’ through ‘formative holistic assessment’ alongside approving quotations from learners ‘overcoming challenges’ to ‘confront issues’ that ‘boost confidence’ and ‘communication skills’. Quotation marks here become as redundant as the superfluous use of the word ‘skills’, indiscriminately mixed with ‘attributes’ and – a new one on p.17 – ‘dispositions’. Psychologists who endeavour to distinguish meaningfully between these terms must be turning in their laboratories! And what is anyone to make on p.17 of ‘core attributes (personal and generic graduate attributes) and employability competences’ developed by ‘whole curriculum approaches’ to ‘undergraduate employability skills and attributes’?

All this ‘attribution’ – if not ‘learning’ – is related by the report to ‘the knowledge economy’, a notion that has surely seen its boom and bust! But no, ‘the development of a knowledge economy will be dependent on sustaining… social mobility’ (p.18). And

‘Modern universities with the most socially inclusive profiles made a positive contribution to social mobility with graduates moving into higher socio-occupational groups compared to their family backgrounds. Moreover, the earnings of these graduates were likely to be 15 per cent higher than the earnings of people with lower qualifications, many of whom could have progressed to university but did not do so.’ (p.19).

This is the rub, for, while it is clearly the view of Willetts and Gove that too many working-class kids have gone to university and should be returned to the apprenticeships and to FE whence they have strayed, if masses of young people supported by their parents are prepared to become endebted up to £27k+ in hopes of ‘15 per cent higher than the earnings of people with lower qualifications’, then Willetts welcomes Million+’s report which turns what was HE into FE, if not Youth Training in flexible paraprofessional labour.

The report recognises this will not happen automatically but ‘requires not only institution-wide change but a dramatic shift in organisational cultures’ (p.8 and again pp.15 and 17). This is necessary to change institutions that were once part of a unified culture of higher education and which in many instances made the best of their inception as polytechnics intended to extend higher education on the cheap to pioneer new forms of alternative provision to adult and locally living students. They offered an alternative to, on the one hand, the finishing school model of the campus universities (until recently at least, often experienced as something of a three-year packaged holiday by many students), and, on the other, to academic cramming combined with ruling-class role play for the elite. The polytechnics thus attempted to combine theoretical knowledge with practical skill (in a real and not debased sense of behavioural competence). It is still possible to maintain this polytechnic ideal but it is discarded in this Million+ report. Any of the rival universities groups that are tempted to imitate it – if only to diversify their market base – will face ‘The major challenge’ that the report recognises, which is ‘cultural rather than technical so that more staff recognise the importance of introducing such approaches to teaching and learning into their own courses’ (p.17). Belated resistance to this kulturkampf must be recognised and supported by universities outwith Million+ institutions. The wider academic community should not therefore turn their backs on those institutions most vulnerable to reduction to e-learning hubs, merger, take-over or closure. Like the Dickensian ‘Cabs, hackney-coaches, “shay” carts, coal-waggons, stages, omnibuses, sociables, gigs, donkey-chaises – all crammed with people… the question never is what the horse can draw, but what the vehicle will hold.’