We don't want no pricey education

Interesting wee piece in thegrauniad today about tuition fees. While it of course now only refers to England, it did touch on a couple of things that I'd been thinking for a while. In the dark days before May 2007, the fact that us sweaty socks had to pay the graduate endowment was seen as a bit of a turn off to students from low-income backgrounds. I knew plenty folk at school who were put off the idea of moving away from Glasgow to go to yoony, or who were put off even going entirely, because of the idea that it would cost them too much. It needn't. There is so much free money floating about the education system that you don't even have to be particularly clever or inventive to get your hands on it - my flatmate got £900 from the University Hardship Fund last week to help her pay rent, and she don't need to pay it back. A friend at Glasgow Uni applied for a Sutherland Scholarship, and got £500, not for being particularly gifted, but because he went to the effort of applying for it.

There is no reason whatsoever that anyone cannot go onto higher education for financial reasons, unless you have a rich da who doesn't give you any of his cash. That is of course a tragedy, because all the middle-class wee twerps like me will just keep going to study because we can't think of anything else to do, and when we're there we'll meet fellow bourgeoise people, and have children with them, and send them to uni because they can't think of anything more inventive to do. (ok, they might actually want to go, but bear with me) Social mobility has ground to a halt under Labour, both here and down south, partly because people are increasingly being put off higher education for this most base of reasons. The great wave that saw my father and thousands of his peers go from the room and kitchen to the lecture theatre and beyond has passed. Of all the Glasgow folk I know up here in St Andrews, for example, most come from the 'burbs or the West End. It's kinda inevitable, but still a sad reflection. It's almost enough to make me want to go to Tesco and buy a bottle of Bolly to drown my sorrows with.

So what to do? I must say I'm not totally against the idea of fees, if they're done properly, with adequate bursaries for those who can't pay. Why should someone who has had a pricey education at Hutchie or The Academy suddenly start getting it for free when it really counts? Universitites must also do more to go into places where they haven't really been before, but then again, they're not going to have much luck finding people with Highers in some schools in Glasgow. At least in Scotland, we can vote for a party that truly values social justice, and wants to equip our parliamentarians with the tools to really do something about it rather than talking about it.