{"id":925,"date":"2017-05-05T06:00:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-05T06:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/?p=925"},"modified":"2017-05-04T14:01:30","modified_gmt":"2017-05-04T14:01:30","slug":"mwr-government-widened-gap-rich-poor-education","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/making-work-real\/2017\/05\/mwr-government-widened-gap-rich-poor-education\/","title":{"rendered":"MWR: Has the Government Widened the Gap Between the Rich and Poor in Education?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"William<\/a>
William Groth, first year business student at Southampton, discusses government policy and its impact on education.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

When looking at Europe\u2019s leading economic powers such as Germany, the United Kingdom and France there is a reason to believe that in terms of education the UK has made it possible for the gap between rich and poor to widen furthermore (Paton, 2010). One example for how the government is making it more difficult, for less fortunate young people to come out of poverty, would be that tuition fees increased tremendously (Boffey, 2016). The UK now has the highest tuition fees worldwide, on average about \u00a36,000 a year, higher even than in the United States (Espinoza, 2015). This change from \u00a33,200 (Paton, 2010) to a maximum of \u00a39,000 in 2012, was a near threefold increase. Although changes have been made to student loan terms and access for less fortunate students has supposedly been bettered, one still asks the question why so much cost needed to be transferred from state to the student?<\/p>\n

Labour\u2019s Gareth Thomas even went as far as calling it a \u201ctragedy for a whole generation of young people\u201d and the National Union of Students labelled it, \u201can outrage\u201d! (Coughlan, 2010). As less fortunate young people graduate University with around 3 times the debt (Hutton, 2012), it makes it harder for them to get back on their feet and build a solid financial base, while young people from more fortunate background can rely on family to take on the cost fully or at least help with it.<\/p>\n

In Germany for example, University education is free, apart from a service fee of \u20ac150-\u20ac250 per term (Oltermann, 2016). Although that is a huge burden for the economy and also bares problems with it, it creates problems that not young people have to deal with but more experienced people who grew up without the burden of debt, to get a high-quality education, therefore, in my opinion, making it easier to escape poverty. This substantial increase in tuition fees also affected many locals and therefore the national economy as it made it harder for universities to attract students. Some cities like Coventry, Dundee and Swansea, where up to 10% economic activity is accounted by student spending, suffer (BBC, 2011).<\/p>\n

Although student numbers haven\u2019t gone down by much, the amount of money they can spend certainly has. Another effect on the economy of the rising tuition fees has been that students might still decide to go to university but research shows that they have changed what and where they study. The research shows that if fees were brought down to \u00a36,000, 45% of respondents would choose a different study and close to 60% would need to work less during term time (Atherto, 2015). This has to have the effect that students don\u2019t do as well due to financial worries and spend more time working rather than studying, making them less able to get higher paid jobs after graduation and less able to push the UK\u2019s economy forward.<\/p>\n

Last but definitely not least, social mobility has decreased immensely due to the rise of fees. There has been a big collapse in part-time and mature students as they cannot get adequate student loans and therefore can\u2019t afford to get further or late first degrees (Adams, 2015). Social mobility affects the economy profoundly, (Calder, 2016) as it is harder for people to rise up the financial ladder once they are settled in life, creating a kind of \u201cone chance society\u201d.<\/p>\n

William Groth studies BSc Business Entrepreneurship<\/u> at Southampton Business school. The views in the article are those of the author. This is part of our \u2018Making Work Real\u2019 series. <\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When looking at Europe\u2019s leading economic powers such as Germany, the United Kingdom and France there is a reason to believe that in terms of education the UK has made it possible for the gap between rich and poor to widen furthermore (Paton, 2010). One example for how the government is making it more difficult, for less fortunate young people …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99274,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1030568],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-925","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-making-work-real","column","threecol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99274"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=925"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":927,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/925\/revisions\/927"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=925"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=925"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/bscbusinessmanagement\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=925"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}