Last Saturday, students from all over the country joined in a demonstration at the Museum Square in Amsterdam, to protest the meagre 1000 euros we maybe get as compensation-which-is-definitely-not-a-compensation for the abolishment of the failed loan system. One of the arguments in favour of the system was that studying is an investment in yourself. But shouldn’t we consider allowing people to pursue higher education, free of financial worry in order to do so effectively, an investment into society itself?
An example often offered is ‘why should the hard-working construction workers, butchers and garbage men have to pay for the education of architects, mechanical engineers, or dentists?’ Besides being an extremely misleading description of how taxes work, what that example omits is that while we – students – need them, they need us just as much. Otherwise, there are no buildings to build, no garbage trucks to ride, and no one to maintain their teeth.
What’s also forgotten there is that the two diploma’s which directly lead to higher education are worth squat by themselves. No employer is going to hire anyone with just those diploma’s. While they are called ‘start qualifications’ – supposed to lead to a high chance of sustainable employment – the expectation here still is that you will go on and study. The one start qualification which can land you a job – the trade schools – is fully government funded. Wait, so we do pay for theirs? I wouldn’t call that very fair!
Our government also talks with a split tongue. On the one hand it argues the ‘self-investment’ angle, but elsewhere it says that the Netherlands is a ‘knowledge economy.’ The idea here is that the knowledge we possess in our corporations and academic institutions yields us significant returns, since the rest of the world comes to us for the smarts. But those smarts don’t appear out of thin air; you have to study for that! So, if I get this correctly, the government and corporations like to reap the benefits of a well-educated group of individuals, but refuse to support them before they get there.
The government’s argument for the ‘compensation’ is that there is just no money for a full, fair, and – in the moral sense – just one. ‘We have things to do regarding sustainability, housing, and defense.’ But remember, a not insignificant fraction of student can expect higher wages, or even capital gains if they’re lucky, which can be – you know – taxed! We will all be better off if we invest in higher education; if that means increasing taxes on the realised fruits of student’s labour, so be it.
All of this – the failed experiment and its fall-out – is just incredibly myopic and overtly individualistic. Society is more than just the sum of its parts. It’s a complicated network of side effects; neglecting one part can affect many others. So how about the government, also in recognition of their grave error, put their money where their mouth is and start investing in us too?
