For the past 90 minutes a police helicopter has been hovering over our building, keeping an eye on the mass of protesters trying to push their way to Westminster: the campaign against raising student fees continues apace.
I have to admit, as much as I like a good street protest, I haven't thrown my lot in with the students on this one. The reason is quite a simple one and can be summed up like this, "fuck-'em, I had to pay for college, so can they." Not very liberal of me I know but there you have it.
Thankfully my budding conservationism was quashed when I took the time to look back over the reality of my college years.
I entered college at 19 and when I walked out at 34 I was lumbered with $34,000 in student loan debt. I had another $30,000 piled on my credit cards- most of which was accrued while I was in school and underemployed. $64,000 in debt for a photography/art history major pretty much guarantees a lifetime of indentured servitude to Uncle Sam and Visa.
Luckily before I was forced into bankruptcy or faking my own death, I landed an IT job, discovered a stack of money in a college fund my parents had forgotten about and through an amazing loophole in US tax law, managed to get every penny of my withholding tax for 1999 returned to me. Thus, within a year of moving to London I found myself completely debt free for the first time ever.
Woo hoo.
Without that perfect storm of a good job, found cash and a tax break there is no way I could have ever, ever, paid of those debts. Far from paying my own way, I managed to land three huge Get Out of Debtors Prison Free cards and I hit them like a semi with no breaks.
Given these humbling revelations I've revisited my knee-jerk reaction to the UK student protests and come to the conclusion that a state sponsored free-ride for college is not in the best interests of the students or the country.
WTF?
Higher education should be subsidized, tuition should be kept under control and there should be need-based grants for those who can't afford the fees but I still feel that the students should contribute something to their education. Even if that something is having to work in the school bookshop three days a week. Let me explain.
My evil ex-girlfriend, the Norwegian, gets free education for life at nearly any school she chooses anywhere in the world. This sounds great but the reality is that she developed an expectation of entitlement that has kept her gainfully unemployed and living the life of a perpetual student. I don't know where she is now exactly, I'm hoping living in a cardboard box behind a strip-club, but I can tell you that in the 10 years we were in contact she had a grand total of one job that could pay her bills. The rest of the time was spent in school accumulating degrees and boyfriends.
Am I bitter and jealous? You bet. Yet if I push aside the anger, I find even more anger. Beneath that comes the same kind of self-righteous rage I hear spewing form the mouths of Torries when they talk about how hard they work to provide for their families while we give free houses to immigrants.
Somebody had to pay for my evil-ex to spend her life playing in the academic sandbox because fuck knows she didn't. On top of that, she contributed not at all to anyone else's education because she was too busy leaching the system. It wasn't like her family was destitute: they owned three fucking Stradivarius violins for Christ's sake!
Granted, I shouldn't let the experiences of one spoiled child taint my world-view but unfortunately it does. A university education should be available to anyone with the intellectual ability to pursue it but giving everyone a blank-cheque leads to complacency. Means tested grants and loans coupled with tuition caps can keep higher education affordable to both those who are in the classroom and those in the work-force paying the bills.
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