In the academic year 2020/21, the crisis posed by COVID-19 has dramatically impacted University life. Students have found themselves stuck studying from their bedrooms, stripped of most of the student experience and consigned to competing with their housemates for insufficient WiFi while crammed into cold, damp HMOs. While staff have made extensive, admirable efforts to adapt to the new style of learning, students have wistfully compared this year’s teaching to previous years and found it desperately wanting. The promise of an ‘authentic’ University experience faded quickly once cases rose throughout the last semester as the reality of student life in the midst of a global pandemic manifested for millions of young people.

It is little wonder, then, that students from every corner of our two islands have been questioning their tuition fees. In twelve months, everything seems to have changed. The way we socialise and the ways we teach and learn have been altered beyond belief. Tuition fees seem just about the only thing that has stayed the same. This has led to a conversation in almost every student circle about the value of fees and how it can be justified that students are still paying the same amount for this most unique of years.

For those of us who have been ardently making the case against tuition fees for years, the renewed focus on the value of fees should be welcomed. Everywhere, in almost every course, students are talking about why they are paying for their University experience. These conversations may have been ignited by the particular challenges around COVID, but they speak to a larger unease among young people about the debt they are accruing for pursuing their education.

Students have been tricked into believing that this is a radical notion. After all, tuition fees will have existed for as long as the graduates of 2021 will have been alive. However, we also need to remind ourselves that the United Kingdom actually exists as the outlier in Europe for charging such extortionate University fees. Scotland, Germany, Finland, Austria, Denmark, Norway and Sweden all do not charge tuition fees while France, Spain, Italy, Ireland and the Netherlands all charge vastly lower sums than UK universities. It is also worth reminding our students that the price of tuition was one thousand pounds per year when they were introduced in 1998. Tuition fees are not inevitable and instead represent a failed neoliberal experiment in funding education by passing the burden onto young people.

Additionally, tuition fees create more barriers to education at a time when we should be breaking barriers down. Research has shown that ‘debt aversion’ deters mostly working-class young people and others from marginalised backgrounds from entering University. Some politicians will point to the fact that more working-class people are going to University than ever before as evidence against this. But that is a shameless attempt by the government to take the credit for the hard work of millions of students who feel that a university degree is more necessary than ever before to succeed in the marketplace.

Moreover, your access to education is a human right, one that does not expire at the end of secondary school. It is also a social good, something that benefits everyone and something that everyone should have access to. Charging students for an education is therefore corrosive to a moral social contract between government and citizen. Some have voiced opposition to tuition fees on the basis of a belief that it will mean higher-earning graduates going to University will have been funded by the taxes of lower-paid labourers. But this is the kind of divisive rhetoric that is almost uniquely reserved for the public good of education. Like education, health care is also a public good and human right. Yet we almost never hear arguments for privatised health care in the UK, or that the burden should fall on those who need access. Instead, the vast majority of us accept that as a collective, we invest in things that benefit all of us, like health care and education. Plus, if we scrapped tuition fees, higher earners would fund Higher Education through progressive taxation.

Higher Education also demands agency on the part of the learner. Effective delivery of University education can only be done in partnership between teacher and learner, with each having an active and joint voice. Good decisions are made in University when students are involved; poor decisions are made when they are left out of the room. But charging tuition fees is part of an agenda of marketization, which undermines student agency and voice. After all, when you buy a product, you might be consulted from time to time but you are never involved in the design of the product. Applying these principles to universities undermines the active role that the student plays in co-designing education and means that students will never have access to the quality education that they deserve.

However, it would be impossible to ignore the unique circumstances in which students find themselves this year and the unique case students have this year to not pay for education.

In the context of a global pandemic, fees have become even more absurd as it has been demonstrated that high tuition fees do not equate to a high-quality education. In previous years, when students questioned their fees, Universities would have pointed to exceptional sports facilities, pristine campuses, welcoming study spaces. The steady buzz of activity on campus, student societies, fairs and events would have been used as an excuse by the government and Universities to justify charging the student. It is now clear that without any amenities, students still find themselves charged for their University experience. Despite the challenges they have faced, the class of 2021 will graduate with exactly the same amount of debt as they would have in previous years. In this sense, 2020/21 has revealed the truth behind tuition fees: that the decision to charge them is not based on anything other than the ideological insistence of the government to shift the burden of paying for education onto the student.

Queen’s PEC is currently closed to most students

Through marketization, the student has been forced to act more as a customer than as a partner. In that sense, the government has created the crisis it now finds itself in, with over two million students across the UK asking themselves why they are paying for a ‘product’ which is simply not the same, despite the best efforts of staff. If students continue to be told that the experience is simply ‘different’ but not lesser, then the government should know that students are very aware that they are being played for fools in a painfully obvious con.

When students have raised these concerns this year, they have frequently been rebuffed by explanations that staff have been working incredibly hard. Many point to the efforts of staff to show that Universities are making huge efforts to ensure that the quality of education is being delivered to the highest possible standard during an unprecedented global pandemic. Indeed, the claim that students deserve fee refunds could be interpreted by some staff as insulting to the work they have invested. Yet it is precisely the opposite. To call for fee refunds is to accept that despite the massive efforts of staff, it has not been possible to guarantee the same product for students this year.

Students do not ever deserve to be saddled with debt for their education, but in the context of 2021, the argument that students should pay anything at all is even more farcical. Of course, Universities cannot be expected to bear the costs of refunds. Many Universities would face financial ruination if they did and others would inevitably be forced to cut costs, threatening student-facing services. Instead, the government has a moral and financial obligation to intervene. In the case of QUB, the Northern Ireland Executive should agree to write off loan payments this year and refund tuition fees for those who do not receive a student loan. The Executive should then work with the government in London to begin the process of designing a publicly-funded, liberated education system, a process that would start with students and staff co-designing the education system that they want.

Students may see this as an impossible goal. And yet 2020 demonstrated that the way we can deliver education can change almost overnight. If the student movement unites around this goal, we can deliver.

Higher Education will only work for all students in society when tuition fees are scrapped. But in the meantime, if they treat us like customers, then they should be prepared to deal with over two million angry consumers who are beginning to realise the con being played upon them: that the system does not work for anyone. That the market has failed. If the government finds this a concerning notion, and I would suggest that they do, then they should work with the student representatives to find a better way of funding Higher Education.

Students are rightly frustrated and angry about continuing to charge tuition fees this year. It is my hope that those questions about fees do not end with the end of the pandemic. If this crisis has made you angry about tuition fees, stay angry. And if you want to do something with that frustration, get engaged in your Union. Run for Council, run for Student Officer, volunteer to be a Faculty, School or Course Rep.

The most effective way to change education is to get involved in it.

Jason Bunting is the Education Officer at Queen’s University Belfast Students’ Union.

This year, the Students’ Union is leading the QUB Students Deserve Better campaign, which is calling on the government to refund tuition fees, waive student debt and create a plan for fully-funded education. Sign up here

OPINION - Time To Refund And Abolish Tuition Fees