Education is too valuable to be priced
9th December 2015
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The benefits of higher education aren’t measurable. No metric can quantify the expanded awareness you sense when you grasp a theory, or understand the link between a fact and conclusion after struggling with it. A lecture that resonates can’t be easily described. An exchange between peers and lecturers has no real reward except itself. And you couldn’t give coins to express how much you appreciate what you receive in class. We’ve evolved on the maxim that education is a valuable object, one without a price.
Nonetheless, with the return of the Tories, neoliberal restructuring policies are encroaching fast, creating a mindset where the primacy of profit prevails above all rational considerations. The new higher education green paper is only the scaffolding of the coming ruins, but it is already making universities radically vulnerable to ill-advised reform. Its language shifts the orientation of higher education towards fulfilling market imperatives. By describing students as customers rather than, well, students, and emphasising the primacy of the needs of markets and employers, rather than the integrity of research and learning, the role of higher education is being gradually re-framed to serve the private powers, not the public interest.
Plans to hoist universities to engine of freemarket capitalism and reconstitute the learning environment in order to serve imperatives of big business have been underway for years, with neoliberal restructuring of higher education markets coming in to effect under the coalition government. As well as saddling graduates with enormous debts, and planning to sell off portions of the loans book to Rothschild Bank, the reforms removed funding for undergraduate teaching and privatised its provision.
Education activists have emphatically argued that the maketisation of the university is one of the most fundamental threats to the integrity of public life in the UK. Universities are a basic, vital means of personal and social development. They act as microcosms of the society at large, producing valuable research and economic goods.

Plans to hoist universities to engine of freemarket capitalism and reconstitute the learning environment in order to serve imperatives of big business have been underway for years, with neoliberal restructuring of higher education markets coming in to effect under the coalition government. As well as saddling graduates with enormous debts, and planning to sell off portions of the loans book to Rothschild Bank, the reforms removed funding for undergraduate teaching and privatised its provision.
Education activists have emphatically argued that the maketisation of the university is one of the most fundamental threats to the integrity of public life in the UK. Universities are a basic, vital means of personal and social development. They act as microcosms of the society at large, producing valuable research and economic goods.
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