We love to moan about the system – how it conditions our thought, places expectations upon us, is inflexible and ill-suited to the modern context etc. – and that moaning isn’t limited purely to students. Free education sounds wonderful but, in reality, a subsidised higher education sector works against students’ best interests. The increasing supply of universities, places, graduates, qualifications etc. continuously devalue educational qualifications. With the exception of courses that have a significant vocational content such as Medicine, Engineering, Nursing, Teaching and Natural Sciences, many graduates will find their course’s academic content mostly unnecessary for the line of work they plan to enter. Unfortunately, an oversupply of graduates means that many firms advertise relatively well-compensated occupations as being exclusively ‘grad jobs’. This serves to reinforce the perception that you actually need a degree to even be capable of doing these jobs when, in actuality, it’s just that so many people currently have degrees that it’s pointless applying if you don’t. The necessary skills are better taught outside of a university.
What about all those who would essentially be coerced into going to university because, with free education and the increased supply of graduates, they’d have even less of a chance out there without a degree than they do now? What about those who left education earlier and whose relatively meagre qualifications are further devalued because of more graduates in the labour market? Funnily enough, the income inequality that education subsidies purport to alleviate would only increase. The training required to get a ‘good job’ (and, therefore, to fill them) would simply be lengthened due to qualifications’ devaluation. Normative signposting for how best to spend time is a subtle deprivation of civil liberty.
What is education? Why do we value one form of learning over another? Why stop at higher education? Why not subsidise gap years to Southeast Asia where people ‘discover themselves’? Subsidising one form of education almost always forcefully elevates it to a normatively superior perceived status; this perpetuates social structures, labour market characteristics, outcomes etc. since this normative dimension of legal institutions works to resist our attempts to reinvent social structures and deviating from the accepted norm. Does society really need to pay to offer free behavioural conditioning and thereby limit its own evolution? Free education protests are (mostly) unintended expressions of backward, socially destructive and misery-perpetuating conservatism veiled in social liberalism via equal opportunities and rights rhetoric.