Nicholas Barrett

The student protest may or may not be a lost cause but there is one definitive argument that has to be made if our case is to win.  It’s an argument that Aaron Porter and other NUS spokesmen seem unable to make.  The only way for students to win is to convince the nation that paying higher education is in the interest of everybody and that is why everybody should help to pay for it. 

When we wake up we turn on the radio and put the kettle on, in doing so we are all directly benefiting from the radio show creators and their degrees in digital media, the designer with deign degrees who deigned the radio & kettle.  As well as that we are we take advantage of the men and women with degrees in power & engineering who operate and maintain that national grid that allows you to turn on the radio and make a cup of tea.  If the first two minutes of almost every day of you life you have personally benefited from years and years of (paid for) higher education

Throughout your day you will continue to benefit from people who have worked and studied hard to attain a degree.  If you are ever in the unfortunate circumstance of having to call an ambulance then you will be thankful that somebody paid for the paramedic to receive a university education.

Forcing students to pay for their own education for most of the rest of their lives paints the education that helps all of us as a individualist step up the career ladder solely for good of the graduate.  As a policy it is an enemy of both aspiration and community cooperation.  We go to university so we can help ourselves to help the society that we all want to live and work in.  Perhaps its gullible to say there are no students enjoying a subsidised ego trip at our expense but to say that not true of MP’s working in the house of commons is far more naive.  

So when students asked ‘why should anybody else pay for education’, we should reply ‘because they want to live in a Britain that is great thanks to public investment in higher education’.