This Is Why Higher Education Shouldn’t Be Free
Coming from a low-income family — please, don’t make higher education free.
There are many policies which sound fantastic when you say them out loud. “Let’s make higher education free for all!” is one of them.
This high-minded, lofty ideal has been a talking point in British politics for a decade at least. The Liberal Democrats, entering into their 2010 Coalition government with the Conservatives, had promised to lower the tuition fees (the opposite happened, but that’s another story entirely), and have long imagined a Britain with no tuition fees at all.
Sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? Going into the adult world as a blank slate, a tabula rasa, rather than laden with tens of thousands of pounds in debt? Sign me up.
Except… don’t.
What happens when you make something that costs something, free? The cost doesn’t go away — it gets shifted elsewhere. Somebody else’s problem now. For the consumer, it just looks free.
(And yes, higher education has to cost something to someone because universities need to employ countless specialist professors, postdoctoral students, researchers, admin staff, cleaners, welfare services, and so on. The costs of running such monolithic institutions as universities are accordingly monolithic.)
