More Zonkyness

The peculiar thing about the student protests are the reactions of ordinary people – gathered through various Facebook posts. There is not a lot of sympathy for the plight of students out there. Negative reactions to the violence are all very reasonable, although there does seem to be a media slant towards the violence committed by the students as opposed to the violence committed by the police – after all the figures are something like 12 policeman injured and 43 protestors injured, which doesn’t sound very even-handed to me. Especially when you consider that many minor injuries amongst the protestors will be unreported whereas they are much more likely to be reported amongst the police (it’s an “injury at work” sort of thing).

The reactions against students in general protesting on the tuition fees issue seem to concentrate on :-

1. Why should the government pay for the students to study anyway ?
2. Students should go out to work to pay for their studies rather than just skiving off with a handful of lectures a week.

Basically students have a bad reputation for some reason, and most of the anti-student comments are not justified. Let’s take the work argument first.

Studying for a degree is hard work. You may well find students walking around at any time during the day, and discover that students have just 2 hours of lectures a week. All is not quite as it seems … First of all, students on 2 hours of lectures a week are pretty rare, and just because there are just two lectures doesn’t mean that’s all of the work they are expected to do.

In a typical week, a student may have lectures, tutorials, be expected to read a huge pile of books, and write an essay or six. And that’s before considering some courses where the students may have to spend time on projects – a series of themed photographs, writing a piece of software, building a high-precision lathe, etc.

And things are not always timetabled especially well for a student’s convenience – a student may have two hour long lectures in the morning with an hour’s break in between. Depending on what the student needs to do in terms of other work, that hour may not be easy to work through – sure a student can open up a netbook and write a few words of an essay, but that huge book on “Operational Management” that they suddenly realise they need may be at home, or booked out of the library. That student you see in the park outside the library messing around, may well be later working for 6-hours in the library before going home and spending a couple of hours sorting out their lecture notes.

When I started my degree many years ago, it was pointed out to me that students on the course I was on were expected to work at least 40-hours a week with the amount of time going up as it approached exam periods. Sure there are students who goof off, but most only do so for a few weeks at most; the ones who keep goofing off end up being thrown out or end up with a poor degree.

On a similar note, it is common to see criticisms of how much students spend their time drinking and partying. In University towns, it has gotten to the point that people assume that loud bunch of young people running down the street at midnight (or later) are students. How do they know ? It is not as if students are marked in some way – those young people could be anybody – students, or a group from some workplace.

And why shouldn’t students have a night out from time to time ? If you work hard, you need to play hard too – to unwind; this is particularly important when your “work” is the kind of thing that you don’t put down at the end of the day and go home, but something you take home with you.

I happen to live in a flat on a road that is fairly busy at night – it is a route commonly used by students (or anonymous young people) to stagger home after a drink or six in some of the main drinking areas. Whilst there is a few groups almost every night, people forget just how many students are around – at certain times of the year, the procession of groups is almost continuous from midnight to 2am, but for most of the year the groups are few and far between. It would seem to me that students go out for a drink or six far less often than people assume.

Now let’s tackle the thorny issue of whether the government should pay for students or whether they should pay for their own education. Let’s make it a little less vague – should the community (through taxation) pay for students to study ? Even in the most distant past, there have been communities who pay for exceptional students to go to University – at least as far back as the 14th century. In those times of course, it was only the exceptional few who got to go to University with the support of the community; the overwhelming majority were the sons (daughters were stuck at home) of the wealthy who got to go.

This led to a situation where the overwhelming majority of the population were lucky to get enough education to read and write poorly – only a tiny number were lucky enough to get a more complete education and become part of the “knowledge economy”. That was fine (if more than a little unfair) way back in the 14th Century, but what about today ?

Today, the UK economy is dependent on having a highly skilled workforce and will become more and more dependent on skilled workers., Indeed during the recent recession, it was noticeable that many firms went to great lengths to try and retain staff rather than dump them as would have happened in earlier recessions – they realised that to recover from the recession, they would need those highly skilled workers and did not want to take the chance that they would be unavailable come the recovery. The old days when money could be made by using large numbers of unskilled labour are over in this country – the places where such tactics work are places where wages are so low that it wouldn’t be possible to employ people in this country.

Today’s students are tomorrow’s “knowledge workers” – even those doing media studies, or games programming (both are useful skills for industries that bring in billions). We need young people to get good qualifications to pay the taxes of the future and ensure that the economy is healthy enough to ensure that we get a reasonable pension.

Who benefits from a plentiful supply of highly qualified graduates ? The graduate does to a limited extent – he or she has a better chance of getting a highly paid job (although that is not guaranteed). Private industry benefits because it has a work force with added value. Government does become a highly qualified work force ensures that the money coming in from taxation is high. In fact we all benefit.

So why do people insist that the prospective graduate pay ? When you consider that we all benefit when those students work for a degree, isn’t it more than a little selfish to insist that they pay ?

In addition to protesting, the students need to do a little PR work – their protests will never work until they get a significant amount of the general population on their side. And they have some negative PR to overcome – the violence at their demonstrations.