[Just one sentence to say that while the activities I have been engaged in this week –exams (both oral and written), yearly doctoral interviews, last minute BA dissertation revisions– are absolutely necessary I hate how they use up the energy needed to write. With no writing (and I realize this is another sentence) it feels as if there is no point to a week, no matter how exhausting it has been… or how useful.]
Today I’m combining two items which have been waiting for attention for a while. One is an article from La Vanguardia and the other a report by the union Comisiones Obreras. I’m here interrupting myself to comment that one thing I learned while interviewing students for their oral exams this week is that students don’t read papers (which I know) but just use Twitter to check on the day’s trending topics (I guessed but didn’t know for sure). This means that, among thousands of other relevant items of information, they may have missed the two I’ll comment on. One, by the way, I found browsing the papers as I do at lunch break (I no longer read print papers… that’s for retired people as a student said); the other reached me via email, a medium that students also find obsolete and that, I’m sure, only use with us, ageing teachers.
La Vanguardia sums up the main findings by Fundació Bofill’s 125-page report Via Universitària: Ser estudiant universitari avui by Antonio Ariño Villarroya and Elena Sintes Pascual (http://www.fbofill.cat/sites/default/files/ViaUniversitaria_InformesBreus62_100516.pdf). This report is based on a survey run among 20,512 students in the 19 universities of the Catalan-speaking regions of Spain, within the network Vives. I confess I have not read the report and I refer only to the summary.
No surprises here: families are the main contributors to the cost of educating their children which, logically, puts children from impoverished social backgrounds at a serious disadvantage regarding their better-off peers. Nothing new, then, except that a matter such as taking a year abroad within the Erasmus programme is now practically compulsory, disregarding how this widens the gap between middle-class students and their poorer peers (the grants are a joke…). The report claims that 30% students finance their studies by working, part or full time; only 0.7% of the students surveyed have fallen into the trap which student loans are turning out to be. 13% enjoy some kind of grant; they are included within the 41% of students who study full time (um, the figures do not add up, do they?). More interesting findings: Mothers are crucial–it seems that the more educated a mother is, the more they invest in the education of their children (most of these mothers were themselves new in the Spanish university in relation to their family background). The report is clear: most students (above 40%) have an upper class or upper-middle class background and college-educated parents, yet many outside this group are upwardly mobile, coming from families with no college-educated members. I have never heard, however, of middle and upper-class children taking up professional training in a blue collar trade–though there must be some measure of downward social mobility even when both parents are college- educated and/or wealthy.
The Boffill report claims that combining work and study need not affect the student’s marks, though it does affect class attendance. No student, they claim, uses more than 20 hours a week to study anyway… though I don’t know whether they mean apart from attending classes. This is, excuse me, total bullshit. Along my own university years I went from being a full-time student (with my fees funded by the Government on the basis of my marks) to being a full-time worker, as my life became complicated by my father’s total lack of interest in my university education and his constant pressure for me to work full time. I left home too early, married unwisely and found myself in the obligation of doing whatever it took to study –which, of course, meant working full time, as my father wanted. Not common, perhaps, but replace ‘married unwisely’ with ‘started sharing a flat’ and then the whole situation is not that odd. This means that in my last year I did what I could to attend classes and I suffered very much for missing them. It’s true that in my first two years, when I just worked some hours a week as a private tutor to earn myself some very necessary pocket money, I had plenty of time to spare. Yet, I put it to good use, reading, visiting exhibitions, learning all I could beyond my courses. In my last year, I simply hated my life, as I didn’t know whether I was a worker or a student. Would I have got better grades? Not necessarily. I recall, however, that time as a horrid, stressful period of my life. A student should be a student, period, and that means full time. A paid job is fine as a complement but when it starts draining away energies needed for study then it’s a serious obstacle, not an aid.
The Comisiones Obreras report shows what families and students in Spain face up regarding the cost of study. This is a study of the evolution of university fees between 2011 and 2016 (see http://www.fe.ccoo.es/comunes/recursos/25/2227033-Estudio_de_precios_publicos_universitarios.pdf). No surprises here, either, though it’s frightening to see the actual figures. The report shows, to begin with, that Spain is among the very few countries in Europe to have responded to the 2008 crisis (which coincided with the implementation of the new BA and MA system in 2009) by steeply raising the university fees. It’s funny to see that the United Kingdom is neatly split between England/Wales/Northern Ireland, which decided to go as far as possible down this road with fees up to 9,000 pounds, and Scotland, where a university education costs the student very little. The report offers the figure of 6,460 euros as the average cost of the current 4+1 university education system in Spain, which is certainly nothing in comparison to the 54,728 euros the same costs in England; still, Spain has 4,000,000 unemployed people and one should think that state-funded free education should be the way our of that situation. The report reaches exactly that conclusion.
It is funny to see how different the tone is in the Bofill and the CCOO report: the former is descriptive of a situation contemplated with a certain scientific distance (the comment on upward social mobility discloses even a certain optimism), whereas the latter is clearly biased towards implementing better social policies regarding access to education. As usual, the more advanced European countries in this sense are the four Nordic ones: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark –precisely the ones distinguished by a very different approach to social equality. Scotland is another interesting case, particularly for Catalonia, for its independentist aspirations have led to the realization that it must invest on the development of its human capital (though Scots have a serious problem in that their best educated citizens tend to migrate elsewhere).
Spain, in short, is just a disaster: we are keeping away from the university talented people by not giving enough grants and forcing the few who manage nonetheless to prove their brilliancy to migrate, thus doing rich nations like Germany and the United States the favour of benefitting from our scant public money. And what can I say about Catalonia? The price per credit in 2011 was already the highest in Spain (at 20.11 euros) and it’s now 33.52; the average 60 credits fee used to be 1,206 in 2011-12 but it’s now 2,011 euros. The second most expensive average yearly fee, that of the community of Madrid, is just 1,638. The lowest is 713 (in Galicia). I won’t even mention the fees for MAs, which have no explanation at all as the same staff is used to teach them with no extra cost added to our salaries.
It seems then clear that the 2008 crisis (still ongoing in Spain as Brussels knows and the Government wilfully denies) must have expelled many thousands from the Spanish university: those who suffered from some personal calamity like their parents or themselves losing their jobs, and those who could never afford the ever increasing university fees. The crisis, in case I have not insisted sufficiently on this here, has also done away with the full-time teaching jobs that allowed PhD candidates to complete their dissertations. And, yes, we all know that things are worse in Catalonia, for obscure political reasons that are never evident enough, whether they are national Spanish or national Catalan.
There are days when nothing makes sense. If the idea is going back to the smaller middle-class Spanish university of the 1970s, before Felipe González’s Government opened up the classroom to us, working-class children, I wish they would tell us. The same applies to the even scarier impression that perhaps the plan is shutting down the public university for good. What cannot be sustained is this constant anxiety that we’re not wanted: the students, the teachers, the research, the whole university. Why all this ill-treatment? How are we offending society?
Perhaps, just perhaps, what is feared, after all, is the downward mobility which I mentioned, for if the university is made accessible to the best students, no matter what class they come from, this means necessarily that the room at the top for the upper classes will shrink. After all, there are no good jobs for everyone with a university education, as we know, so why not make sure these are not available to working-class persons, beginning by making sure they never get the required university education?
Just an ugly thought, as who would jeopardise the future of a whole nation in this way, right?
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