No Fees! No Cuts! No Closures!

In September 2006, the new education bill will become law and will involve full-time undergraduates paying up to £3,000 a year in top-up fees. This is supposed to help universities meet their current budget deficits but the cause behind such deficit is years of under-funding by the Tories and now New Labour.

New Labour’s claim that there is no money in society to fund education publicly is inconsistent. After all it was New Labour who cut corporation tax once in power and have since given away tens of billions of pounds to big business in tax cuts. It is also this government that is currently spending billions of pounds on weapons development and a war for oil in Iraq, which the majority oppose and which has turned the world into a more dangerous and unstable place. Blair’s proposals will not solve the funding crisis in higher education. They are rather a step towards privatisation where education is put on the free market for big business profit.

One of the starkest examples of how the quality of education has been worsened by fees, cuts and privatisation is the number of university departments closing and lecturers being made redundant in higher education. This is due to the financial pressure on university managements to close subjects that need more labs, books and teaching time and that are struggling to find private finance.

At the same time, students in the more popular subjects are finding themselves overcharged for under-resourced services. Students are increasingly provided with fewer and overcrowded seminars, taught by PhD students or lecturers on casual contracts as a result of university managers trying to provide teaching on the cheap.

Profit-hungry businesses see higher education as a way of getting the state to subsidise their training and recruitment, and so are turning universities into a training ground for their work force at the same time as they are run for profit.

Outside of their academic work, students still face massive personal difficulties. A recent survey showed that more than one third of students live on under £40 per week after accommodation costs are taken into account. The undergraduate drop-out rate, affecting mainly working-class students, is currently at a high of 18%! That is almost one in five students dropping out of universities mainly due to financial hardship. Others are discouraged from applying to university altogether due to high living costs and increasing student debts.

Vice chancellors typically receive over £100,000 a year in salaries, putting their standard of living far above the majority of workers and students. This makes them identify more with business interests than with those who suffer from having their education sold off. We call for universities to be run democratically by committees of lecturers, workers and students.

Campus workers and trade unionists are not taking these attacks lying down. The Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Higher and Further Education (NATFHE) have been taking industrial action, strikes and boycotts, to defend jobs and pay which are under attack as part of the marketisation agenda in education. These disputes will continue in the next year and others will develop as a result of profit-driven big businesses entering our institutions.

Socialist Students is fighting for a publicly funded system of education at all levels. Military spending, fat cat salaries, and big business profits should be spent on public services and education. We campaign on a daily basis against all attacks on the right to a free quality education and have built a strong tradition of linking up with workers on campus in order to unite the struggle against the selling-off of our education. We are also fighting within NUS to adopt a national strategy to beat cuts, closures and fees and to mobilise the mass of students while preparing them to join with the trade unions for a successful campaign in defence of all our services.