Are tuition fees that unjust for the well off? (Higher Education - Free for all or Fee for all?)

Name: Brighton-Rock

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Product:	Higher Education - Free for all or Fee for all?
Date:	19/04/05 (150 review reads)
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I would like to write on the rather controversial issue of tuition fees in English universities.

It seems there are a vast number of people opposed to any sort of fees at Universities. Many think therefore that university education should be completely free, a right not a privilege. I do to, to a limited point. I think university education should be free to those unable to afford such a privilege, those who have genuine ability but through personal circumstances would be unable to attend a University without state support. Arguably, these poorer students deserve some sort of grant towards their living costs. There are plenty of students in genuine need. However, there a plently who are not.

As a former student at a Southern University, what rather grated on me was a particular type of student. The incredibly comfortable yet ungrateful middle class type. The type who was happy for daddy to pay for her to go on her skiing holiday, was happy for daddy to pay for her car, was even happy for daddy to pay for her to go to a private school and have a tutor to get her to university in the first place, but ask daddy to contribute to the cost of her education at university and that is deemed as the biggest injustice of all time.

What is often missed in the tuition fee debate, is that in refusing to pay for one's tuition, students or their parents are expecting the government to dip into the state fund; a fund which is desperately short at times. Yes, education should be a right, but what some privately educated university students fail to comprehend is that that right is not an equal right for the under 18's at present. Our comprehensive schools (which I attended) need vast resources poured into them. Kids on council estates up and down the land cannot sometimes afford a school uniform let alone even think of university. In many schools, there are inadequote resources, swelling class sizes and children in real and genuine need. So when students demand their education should be totally funded perhaps they should should recognise university is not enforced upon them, it is a choice they make, a great choice in fact for them to have a pleasant few years, to expand their mind, to have a fantastic social life, to have a lie in, to avoid the real world. This is a privilege and perhaps they need to pay for it rather than making the state dig deeper at the expense of the more genuinely needy and deserving.

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