Education should be about progress, not prostituted as a means to

earn more
Alex Andreou
Universities being allowed to buy graduates’ student loans is another blow
to society’s collective forward motion

Proposals have been drawn up to allow universities to buy a graduate’s

student loans. The idea is the brainchild of former universities minister David
Willetts, who was recently shuffled out of his position, and it seems to be
gaining traction.
Willetts explained on Monday’s Newsnight that “the main point of the idea is
to give universities a stronger incentive to focus on the jobs and the earnings
prospects of their graduates”. Critics fear this will encourage universities to
concentrate on degrees with high earnings potential at the expense of degrees
that may be beneficial in more diffuse, but no less significant, ways.
This development is unsurprising, but deeply worrying. It is unsurprising
because it is merely the next step on the damaging trajectory of education
being viewed as a glorified form of job training. It is worrying because it
relies on the idea that individuals are mere economic units, there to serve the
economy, rather than the other way around. Education is no longer
formulated as the question “what would you like to be when you grow up?” It
is expressed as a requisition order by industry for x number of fully trained
IT engineers or pharmacists.
To disincentivise the more general, but vital, benefits of education as a
humanising process that fosters critical thought, tolerance and equality, is
deeply regressive. It is the expression of a state that wants people who can
work, not people who can think. It goes hand in hand with a growing distrust
of “intellectuals”; a nexus that includes everything from dismissing Ed
Miliband as a cerebral “geek”, to criticism of London by Ukip as “too
sophisticated”. This is a nexus that in the past has led to South American
juntas targeting academics or – its most chilling and extreme manifestation –
the Khmer Rouge shooting people who spoke a foreign language or wore
glasses, because they were deemed to be spending too much time reading
rather than working.
The Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis once said that antisocial and anti-
human behaviours (including everything from totalitarianism to criminality)
were the result of “the beast within” against which the “only antibiotic is
education”; the kind of education that is not favoured by governments,
“because it produces free and non-submissive citizens, who are of no use to
the lowly game of party politics”.
University, of course, is but one route to an education in the broad sense. I
am not suggesting that a formal higher education is the only way to achieve
personal enlightenment. I am rather suggesting that providing the tools to
personal enlightenment ought to be one of the principle aims of a formal
higher education.
When measures like this are announced, with the specific aim of “reducing
the burden on the taxpayer”, the message is very clear: educating the next
generation – our children and grandchildren, that is – is a burden, rather than
an investment in our future. Such policies prostitute education as a means
solely of achieving a pre-determined salary, rather than a means of creativity,
thought, civilisation and ultimately evolution. We declare, as a society, our
intention to train individuals for competitive upward mobility, rather than to
educate a generation for collective forward motion.