Ones to Watch/Guardian writing competition winner: Pay-as-you-go lectures would give us real choice

January 17, 2012 - 2 comments

Ones to Watch and Education Guardian are thrilled to announce that the winner of our joint writing competition is Luke Braidwood.

Luke is a third-year BA Biological Sciences student at the University of Oxford. He enjoys writing, taking photos, and walking up hills in the Lake District. In the future he would like to see the world, write, do a PhD in crop sciences, and maybe even find a job.

His entry, written in answer to the question ‘With fees tripling to £9,000 a year at most universities, is it inevitable that the student will become a consumer?‘, has been published on guardian.co.uk, as part of the launch of the Blogging Students section.

He writes:

It’s 9:45, I’m mildly hungover, and relying on a strong black coffee to stay awake. The dulcet tones of a greying, portly biochemistry professor rumble around a gloomy lecture hall, which is clad in oak and filled with tacky plastic chairs. We’re learning about the organization of the plant metabolic network, which is only about half as much fun as it sounds.

After the summary, which seems strangely unfamiliar, we each rummage around, pull out £30, and place it on the front desk in a heap of crumpled notes and loose change. Sam asks me to lend him some cash; he’s forgotten his wallet for the third time this month. The professor pulls out a hessian sack and starts sweeping the money (about £1800) into it, then walks outside whistling.

I get ten lectures a week, some of them from obtuse or incomprehensible lecturers, and place £300 weekly at the front of the lecture hall. There are 30 teaching weeks in a year, so pay around £9,000 for all my lectures. I think about this, look for a paracetamol in my bag, and wonder if I’m getting my money’s worth.

The protagonist (Joe) of this tale lives in a slightly different world, with £9000 tuition fees that are payable on a pay-as-you-go system. It’s like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, with education instead of appliances. In this world, Joe can stop attending the lectures on plant metabolism he finds so dreary, and so will save money on this module. Perhaps he will spend a small fraction of it on a plant metabolism textbook to help in the exams. Joe is a consumer: he only pays for what he wants, and as such the University receives detailed feedback on which topics and lecturers the student body values most. In our world, students pay the full fee at the start of each year, and turn up to all (or some) of the lectures, laboratory work, and classes that the University provides.

With fees tripling, it is inevitable that students, other than those born to very wealthy families, will think harder about whether and where to go to University, as well as what to study. Despite the Government’s hollow promises of social mobility (it’s certainly not going to increase mobility, is it?) and hypocritical insistence that you can spend any amount of money provided that it’s borrowed at a low interest, poorer students will have to ensure they can justify the expenditure. We’ve watched banks go down, and drag countries down, due to excessive borrowing, so mountainous debt isn’t appealing, regardless of the interest rate.

Making young people think harder about the value of their degree may not be a bad thing. However, the monetary value of a degree is the perception of that degree’s value by prospective employers, which may have little bearing on how well it was taught. If Oxford stopped giving lectures tomorrow (and the media didn’t notice), it would take many years for employers to realize the increased ineptitude of Oxford graduates, and start discriminating accordingly.

In contrast, even the most dynamic, useful and thrilling degree may be undersubscribed if offered by the new kid on the block, as employers don’t demand it. The problem with the fee rise is that it renders students as consumers who lack real choice. They can only pick between degrees, not within them, which both robs students of the opportunity to only pay for what benefits them most, and Universities of the chance to learn how best to teach their students.

Luke’s work has also been published by guardian.co.uk here.

About the author

Rosie Taylor

Founder

Nick146

this is quite frankly ridiculous. i can only assume it won due to the paucity of other entries. firstly, who is the student to decide which lectures are important before they attend? how can the student possibly know which lectures are most important judging from their titles? looking at this from the perspective of a Historian, i can picture lectures on “the bloody fall of the roman empire” being packed to the rafters while lectures on Historical methodology, a vital lesson for aspiring historians, are attended by only a scarce few.
secondly, this would undoubtedly lead to situations where wealthy students attend all their lectures, thus achieving a well rounded education, while poorer students eager to save money miss out on lectures and suffer for it in their results. this is the sort of discrimination we should be trying to escape from.
thirdly, you make a point about the current fee scheme making students consumers and so benefiting the more prestigious Universities while others loll in the doldrums of popularity and success. how exactly would this system solve that? students would still pick based on academic results and prestige; they would still be consumers.
if all the entries operated in this paradigm of “consumers can be powerful! choice is great!” then i think it says a lot about the success of the right wing propaganda that is daily launched out of our newspapers and televisions straight into the minds of ordinary people
John174

Luke Braidwood’s
argument seems to be a logical extension of what is already happening. The
White Paper writes of making the student a consumer at the heart of the degree
and Braidwood asks for more choice within the degree. On the surface, fair
enough. The description of a hung-over student within Luke’s story is very apt,
it is one all students are familiar with. However, Luke has made some glaring
errors, which I cannot sit down and avert my gaze from. For the purposes of
this dialogue I will ignore the premise that 9,000 fees are necessary and will
only engage with what Luke has written about.

Firstly, Luke’s
student has shown extraordinary willpower to make this 9.30am lecture hung-over
on the organization of the plant metabolic network. This is done all over the
country most mornings because students are under the belief that yes, this does
all seem dry, but that it is part of my degree and I probably do need to learn
it for my exam. However if you introduce Luke’s system of pay-as-you-go then
the motivation to go to the lecture drops dramatically, if enough of you don’t
go because it seen as ‘boring’ then it will be dropped by the university. In
this system we are prioritising the whim of an 18- 19-year-old student, someone
with comparatively little experience of the world, over subjects that the
history of humanity has deemed appropriate. For example, I have no conception
that Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina is
any good. This is knowledge I cannot have until I read it, however I can choose
to use my time on it by the knowledge of others, older and more well-read. In
this system we dismiss the idea of a communal pool of knowledge, which is a
fundamental part of what a University is. Furthermore, the whole point of
university is that you are studying topics, which aren’t easy to grasp. The Wasteland isn’t pure joke to begin
with, it’s fucking dry. But the reason you study it is because you believe that
it will eventually make sense, you have to make a leap of faith. Pay-as-you-go
destroys that.

The most fundamental
flaw in Luke’s idea is the timing of decisions. You can’t ask a student who is
hung-over ‘do you fancy going to a difficult lecture this morning?’ when he has
a vicious headache and he wants to lie down a lot. That is a completely
different person to the person who had made the decision to burden himself with
debt for three years with the hope of bettering himself. They are two very different
people. Pay-as-you-go believes the hung-over version of the student is more
informed to make a choice.

Luke has almost made
the error of saying:

“But the value of a degree is simply the perception of that degree by
prospective employers.”

This is wrong. A
degree is not how much cash it can make you once you leave. Your degree is an
opportunity to learn about things you never knew about, three, four, five years
to train yourself for whatever you want to be in society. It should not be
instrumentalized. What I mean by this is that if you go to university for a job
then you give the right answers to the curriculum without critiquing and
thinking about them. You did this at A-Levels to get in to a good university
and you got good GCSEs to get you in to a better sixth form. The whole thing
then just becomes learning-by-numbers for the purpose of a job which, sorry
honeys, may not exist for the class of 2012. Unless of course you do an unpaid
internship, which amounts to nothing more than slave labour and as Owen Jones
has shown in his book The Demonization of the Working Class, an easy
£18.8million pounds worth of free labour every year for Westminster. The unpaid
internship scheme is a thick 10-foot wall between those who can afford a rent
with an unpaid job, and those who don’t have that spare moolah lying around.

So I disagree with Lil
Luke’s idea on pay-as-you-go, one of the more ill-thought solutions to the
topic of tuition fees. I just hope and pray to
that the political elite aren’t reading.