What is a good education?

First, read this old Guardian article*. If you can stomach it, read the comments (I confess I only lasted about a minute). This is a rebuttal of some of the things in the comments, with reference to the article itself; it is also a plea for you to shut the fuck up if you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m in a strange position – my own student debt is already over £75000 and will rise insanely if I get to do a PhD next year (please baby please), but I have also worked a full-time job through the majority of my degree, did an apprenticeship before I made it to uni and am required to encourage my current students onto the university path (which, by and large, I believe is the right path for them). The misconceptions that are perpetuated in ‘discussions’ like this have spilled out at me IRL in quite horrible ways in the past (don’t ask), and I honestly can’t think of anything that’s upset me more. Higher education – and what people perceive to be its shortfalls – continues to be a stick to beat me and others like me with. I want to take the time to address some higher education misconceptions, and explain why some of us think it’s so important, and also refute the idea it makes an elite class.

1) Contact time isn’t what defines your degree as ‘good’ or ‘bad’.

My own undergraduate degree had four hours a week contact time at its peak. It’s in a well-regarded, highbrow arts subject at a top 50 UK institution (and accredited by the University of London); because the basis of my study was a full-time version of a part-time course, we were expected to deal with a lot of things ourselves. Extra support was available (the college’s disability support, for example, is reputedly excellent), but you were supposed to request it off your own back. I know this is not the case for all universities, but I would stress that what is important is the style of learning – are you supposed to be taught a great deal? Or are you supposed to learn to think and analyse and question for yourself and then bring that to the group?

I don’t know about lab time and high contact-hour subjects, but I do know how they view us in the humanities: as slackers, with nothing to learn, with no graft to put in. I don’t know how much reading there is in textbook subjects, but for each of our lectures/seminars we should have turned up having read at least one new text (ranging from two or three pages to famously long novels) and a criticism of the text or a contextual piece by the author. When essay season rolls around, there is a brief reading list but you research your chosen topic yourself and probably spend hours writing or revising because there was no tangible thing to learn earlier in the year. Contact time is not equatable to work put in.

2) Neither is the subject you study.

“We must be the envy of the world in media studies”. “Make science degrees free and hike up the tax for the guff” – “hahahaha I’d rather the philistines had to pay twice the tax”. You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t know what you’re talking about. For starters, yes, we are the world’s envy in media studies. We invented cultural studies. We run excellent, research-led institution in all fields, and media studies is no different. Do you think Wallace and Gromit added nothing to the economy? That the post-production work on Star Wars is done here for convenience rather than our international renown? That Donald Trump’s election win is divorced from the media coverage that surrounded his campaign? All of these things are important economic and academic reasons not to dismiss the study of the media, but for me the foremost reason has to be that as humans it fascinates us. Do you go home from an arduous day at work to code a computer programme for fun? To read academic papers on developments in clinical psychology? Or do you stick the telly on? Or the radio, youtube, flip open a magazine? Do you think this content gets there because you willed it to, or that we cultivate art – all arts – because we want it to be better? We cultivate the study of art because we want to understand it and our society.

A society can be judged on what it values, and so can an individual. No matter what subject you study, the rigour of a degree course will put you through the paces and give you a rounded , critical attitude to things both in and adjacent to your field.

3) Neither is the institution in which you study.

Ah yes, the holy grail of Oxford, Cambridge, Durham, Imperial, St Andrews… the lure of a ‘good’ university. Of course, we do have a ratings system, and as such some universities are nominally better than others, but better at what, exactly? If you go to an arts college, its reputation will tend to precede it – somewhere like Central St Martins, for example (who have produced as many innovators as Oxbridge has Prime Ministers) – and people feel like they know what and how you studied. Or if you go to St Andrews, where everyone types on their Macbook Pros and wears a Barbour jacket and nobody ever answers a lecturer’s question. Or Oxford, where the reading list is rigidly focussed on classics and there is very little cultural commentary. At Aberystwyth, there is a huge campus culture and societies are a valued part of your time there. If judged on my own college’s favoured attitudes to education, these higher-rated courses would be sub-par, because we weight discussion, critical context and diversity very highly. Not every institution values the same things, and you will come out with a different – not lesser – education dependent on where you go.

It is also worth noting that whilst generalisations such as ‘ex-polytechnics have good vocational or specific courses‘, or ‘red brick universities are well-respected‘ are sort-of grounded in fact, they are generalisations. Each course, institution and graduating class will bring a different context to your studies quite apart from the reputation they have among the general populace. Each individual seeks something different from the university experience and should choose a college which suits them. Whether your priority is the growth as a person you will experience from being far away from home, the guidance of a specific teacher (like Scarlett Thomas or Terry Eagleton) or to be guided through your subject like those for centuries before you, somebody will find your skills lacking and somebody will consider them ideal.

4) Student loans are not sufficient for either the institution or the individual.

My student loan didn’t even cover my rent when I lived in a zone 4 houseshare. Books? Don’t make me laugh. Food? What do you need that for? Lidl vodka, pot noodles and avocado toast? Yes, even those student staples had to come out of my wage packet.

In addition, £9000 is not going to cover the four lecturers and 2-3 PhD students that taught me each year, not to mention the group lectures, administrators, librarians, support network, ICT technicians that got me through my degree. That’s just the staff! As I’ve mentioned, I didn’t even have lab time, and I bought a lot of my own books. I would be a lot less resentful of this insane amount of debt if it provided appropriately to the university and myself, but the system is not fit for purpose and still saddles students with an almost incomprehensible amount of debt.

5) Education should only be for those who ‘deserve’ it (replace deserve with whichever word you like, they’re all there in the comments).

Ah, yes. Nobody should study for the joy of it, Higher Education is useless for most professions and only people that are good at things when they’re 15 should be allowed to progress.

University is the first time in your life you are only studying what you love, unencumbered by the national curriculum and earning potential. It is a time to find your niche by researching what you are interested in. If we send only high achievers to university, people who think in a way which deviates from the National Curriculum (in business terms ‘outside the box’) will be kept away. Moreover, if we send people with just one perspective and from just one background to university, we will lose valuable insight brought by people from outside that sphere. Not only is it impossible to measure who ‘deserves’ university (and what exactly would the criteria be anyway?), it is a dangerous way of thinking that keeps our class system in place and our political system untouchable. It prevents people from finding what they enjoy and does not allow people to expand their horizons to develop an informed idea of what they want and can get from life.

It is important for university to be enjoyable, yes, for students’ and lecturers’ quality of life; but allowing people to be lead by enjoyment and allowing people’s curiosity to lead them where their boredom in school may have failed to reach also creates a dynamic and rigorous system of Higher Education which constantly challenges orthodoxy and moves forwards into the fresh and new, which of course reaps economic benefit and creates happy and engaged citizens.

6) This is a crisis that is not only affecting the young and the middle-classes.

The Open University has been hit by a fee increase. Birkbeck, the University of London’s mechanic’s institute dedicated to night classes and educating the ‘working man’ now charges £9000 per year. The students I work with are afraid of the debt that an education would saddle them with, not to mention the living costs of being somewhere for three years without earning.

Who would chase a career dream or develop an interest into a new career if they have to pay so much? Who would gamble more money than they’ve ever known on the mere possibility of social mobility? I conjecture that middle-class children will in the main continue to go to university, since it’s seen as a necessity. The middle-class parents (many of whom benefitted from grants like my own family) will send their children regardless. But the working-class? The older people, whose dyslexia or need to earn money meant they needed to go straight into the workforce? The people with children already, who have to think of their child’s future as well as their own? Will they take on the debt? Less and less. This lack of diversity will impact the quality of education, but also the diversity in the workforce and in what industries flourish.

7) European degrees, or having the army pay for your degree, are not solutions.

One of my closest friends has moved from undergraduate studies at the LSE to a pan-European MA. I know a few people who have been to The Netherlands (one of whom was half-Dutch) and one to Italy. I know people who have enlisted in the armed forces in order to get the skills to pursue the civilian life they want. Aside from the obvious issues with this (being Brexit or the worsening global situation which means you could be called to arms whether you intended it or not), this not a sustainable solution for the British Higher Education sector. It’s an option that is driving people to either enlist in other economies, improving the Higher Education sector in other places and hemorrhaging both British talent and the talent that comes here from abroad (Europe or elsewhere), or reinforces race and class boundaries by making an underclass of student whose priority is employment and an awareness of their future employment by the state, making them complicit in power structures and incentivising them to not question the status quo. Both of these proposed solutions erode the reputation of British universities, which carries disproportionate influence on the international stage and is a reason so many world leaders and innovators come from within our system. Not only would student numbers in British institutions fall, but the reputation of those institutions would fall as they made other choices.

8) We cannot institute the policy of ‘paying’ people for attainment in their degree by giving people with 1st class degrees a discount.

I can’t tell you how much this sickens me. As if it’s just worthwhile people who get 1sts, for one. Everyone knows some jammy cunt genius who appears to do nothing, turns up late to the exam and still gets a first-class honour. Everybody knows somebody who didn’t do the reading and yet when called on by the lecturer has some kind of significant input. I don’t want that bastard getting a discount!

Secondly, not everyone has the same advantages. I don’t just mean people who are powering through a degree with dyslexia or another learning difficulty, or even a physical difficulty (how hard must it be to navigate a library blind? to be late to your seminar because only one wheelchair or pushchair is allowed on the bus and you have to get the next one?). What if you’re living at home and your siblings are loud? What if you have children of your own, like many students at my university do? What if your dad dies in your second year or your money runs out and you’re working late in a bar or your relationship breaks down? These things that I have seen people work around and flourish in spite of – perhaps costing them a few points, but making them into much more resilient, skilled and valuable people.

But there are other, more insidious advantages: grammar and private schools coach students in a way that comprehensives don’t, giving a huge advantage to students who have already learned how to write in that style, answer questions with confidence, and used these same advantages to get in, to make friends, to get internships.

There are also questions like, isn’t it easier to get a first in a subject where there is right and wrong and no variables (i.e. not essay subjects)? What about professors who don’t award 1sts (I know of one in Edinburgh, suspect one at my own university, have heard murmurs of them from all around the UK)? What if you work really hard in one aspect of your degree and pull yourself from being incapable of anything up to a 2:1 – perhaps a language requirement, a secondary musical instrument, a presentation you are nervous of? What if there’s a group project and the fuckup isn’t yours? Do you seriously think we ought to penalise people for hard work at something they’re not good at? There is already snobbery in the way we look at degree classes, don’t make it worse for the person who can’t get on their Teach First course or their MA. Don’t make it worse for the people who didn’t really enjoy their degree but need it for their desired field of work or their job prospects. Don’t make it worse for the people who are the glue of their friendship groups and have supported other people through their crises but didn’t work hard enough on their own things.

My final point to people commenting about higher education, online or otherwise, would be thus: don’t assume your experience of uni – or not going to uni – is the same as everybody else’s, especially years later in a whole new generation. You are not stupid if you don’t have a ‘good’ education. You are not better if you do have a ‘good’ education. This perspective does not devalue education, but neither does it suggest that educated people are better. The world needs all kinds of knowledge, and everybody needs the opportunity to access and pursue education.

*This article is from when I started to write this post, but I had to go away for six months to calm down.

To-Do:

• Find out how to claim overtime at work.
• Find a way to tone up a bit that doesn’t make me hate myself.
• Buy my mum a birthday present.

Today’s Culture:

• Matilda – can we all acknowledge it’s both technically brilliant and deeply enjoyable?
• Serious reading about libraries under Brexit.
• Sleeping in on the weekend now that I don’t have German classes to attend. Also organising a new German class.