Why I Marched

On November 9th, approximately 10,000 students, lecturers, and members of the public marched through central London in protest against the government’s white paper on education.

I marched because the proposed legislation comprises a fundamental attack on the principle of the public university. The White Paper, shamefully entitled ‘students at the heart of the system’, in reality has corporate interests first in mind. It contains provisions allowing for-profit companies to infiltrate higher education and undermine existing universities. Corporate interests will be given licence to develop and market courses with an eye on the financial bottom line, rather than the social good. By surrendering universities to the private sector, future students will be confronted with low quality, ‘off-the-shelf’ degrees as corporations compete to offer popular courses at discount rates.

Public institutions will struggle to stay in the game, as the government has withdrawn all central funding for arts, humanities and social science departments and slashed expenditure on many others. These losses will barely be made up for by the tripling of tuition fees, and commercial pressures will inevitably lead universities to conserve resources by cutting departments. This is already threatened at my university, Royal Holloway, where the Classics, Modern Languages and Computer Science departments are facing significant cuts over the next few years. 

The reforms also threaten to choke off access to higher education for thousands of young people by creating an artificial market in student numbers. The government has altered regulations, now allowing universities to snap up as many top-performing students as they like (those achieving grades of AAB and above) while imposing a new cap on the recruitment of all other students. The expected result of these measures is the evolution of a two-tier system, where elite universities hoard the highest performing students while those that fail to attract enough AAB students find themselves out of pocket, unable to make up numbers as they used to. The prize institutions will be able to be more selective in recruitment, while middling universities compete tooth and nail in a battle to attract students. Some will inevitably succumb to a dearth in funding and collapse, while others will be forced to offer second-rate courses at knock-down prices.

I marched because this legislation will corrode the very foundations on which higher education is built and put a rapacious commercial system in its place. I marched to stop it.

Louie Woodall is a member of the Young Fabians and Assistant Editor of the Young Fabians Blog