HE in UK as a systemic tool for maintaining social inequalities.
This post was inspired by several discussions with my colleagues and tutors during the Theories, Policies, and Practices, as well as the Inclusive Practices unit. While I noticed we spent a lot of time discussing equality in higher education, but we rarely addressed what to me is the elephant in the room: tuition fees.
Coming from a country where free public education is a constitutional right, tuition fees still seem a bit odd. Having completed my BSc in Poland with no tuition fees, were it not for Brexit and potentially losing my resident status if I left the country, I probably would not have paid for my Masters either. In the end, I was only able to complete a postgraduate qualification at UAL due to substantial financial help from my family and a student loan, despite having been in full-time employment for two years prior, and part-time before then. I’m citing this to illustrate that my current ability to get a degree and work in academia in the UK is a direct outcome of my financial privilege.
Going to university, whether funded or not, is an expense in itself and not everyone gets an equal start.
The UK is one of the countries with worst social mobility prospects among the members of OECD (Francis and Wong, 2013). At the same time, students from most financially underprivileged backgrounds (students entitled to free school meals) are 22 times less likely to enter a “selective university” than private school pupils, and 55 times less likely to get accepted to Oxbridge. There is a strong positive correlation between family income and educational achievements of children, which directly translates into formal access to top universities (Carneiro et al., 2022).
Tangent note: social mobility rates are a controversial measure for assessing social justice and some authors argue for focusing on pursuing a more equal society instead (Reay, 2013). I agree with this view.
The unequal access to higher education based on the financial background is amplified by other factors impacting the same groups, such as:
- geographic trends, including unequal access to high-quality primary and secondary education in different parts of the UK contributes to maintaining the North-South divide (Gibbons and Vignoles, 2012),
- limited geographical mobility of students from lower-income or minority ethnic backgrounds, who often cannot move for university due to financial or cultural factors (Pennel and West, 2005).
- Even when provided with tuition fees and maintenance loans, students from underprivileged backgrounds are much more likely to leave university with other forms of debt such as credit card debt and overdrafts, and tend to owe much more money in total (Pennell and West, 2005).
The statistics cited above are truly grim. I couldn’t find numbers that would allow for a direct comparison, but having studied in Poland, where public education at all levels is a constitutional right (Konstytucja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [Constitution of the Republic of Poland], 1997, art. 70.), and in the UK, where postgraduate fees at the time were about a half of the gross minimum wage, I could observe much more income background diversity at my Polish university.
At the same time, the 2021 OECD report, recommended to me by Lindsay Jordan, proves that the economic benefits of a better-educated society significantly outweigh the cost of public funding of HE, dismissing the financial argument for tuition fees at public universities. This leads me to believe that HE in the UK needs rethinking on a structural level, as currently it serves as a tool for sustaining social inequalities. During TPP, we’ve brought up bell hooks’s Teaching to Transgress, and the idea of shifting the power relationships in the classroom by mutual learning through experiential knowledge. In the UK HE, it seems a lot of that knowledge, and the people who hold it, are mostly locked out of the classroom.
References
Carneiro, P., Cattan, S., Dearden, L., Ven der Erve, L., Krutikova, S., Macmillan, L. (2022). Intergenerational income mobility in England and the importance of education. London, UK: Institute for Fiscal Studies. Available at:
https://hdl.handle.net/10419/267954 (accessed: 24.07.2024).
Gibbons, S., Vignoles, A. (2012). Geography, choice and participation in higher education in England, in: Regional Science and Urban Economics, v. 42, pp. 98-113. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.regsciurbeco.2011.07.004 (accessed: 24.07.2024).
Francis, B. and Wong, B. (2013). What is preventing social mobility? A review of the evidence. Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Billy-Wong/publication/272164028_What_is_preventing_social_mobility_A_review_of_the_evidence/links/54dca41f0cf28a3d93f82011/What-is-preventing-social-mobility-A-review-of-the-evidence.pdf (Accessed: 30.08.2024).
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, NY: Routledge.
Konstytucja Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej [Constitution of the Republic of Poland]. Available at: https://www.gov.pl/attachment/e42b27d1-93c0-4a28-9fb1-e12ca639d8f9 (accessed: 30.08.2024).
OECD (2021). Education at a Glance 2021. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/docserver/b35a14e5-en.pdf?expires=1725033553&id=id&accname=guest&checksum=A850E04338E96BE174FAC225A01C2910 (accessed: 30.08.2024).
Pennell, H., West, A. (2005). The Impact of Increased Fees on Participation in Higher Education in England, in: Higher Education Quarterly, vol. 59, pp. 127-137. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2273.2005.00286.x (accessed: 24.07.2024).
Reay, D. (2013). Social mobility, a panacea for austere times: tales of emperors, frogs, and tadpoles. In: British Journal of Sociology and Education, vol. 34. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2013.816035 (accessed: 31.08.2024).