Why Aren’t Students in the U.S. Protesting Tuition, Too?

While London has been rocked by student protests over proposed tuition hikes, United States college campuses have been largely quiet. Tens of thousands of students in the UK have taken to the streets – confronting police, storming the Conservative Party headquarters, even halting the motorcade of the British monarch Prince Charles.

In fact, all across Europe students are revolting. For months, Italian students have been protesting tuition cuts and budget reforms. Greek students have not responded kindly to IMF endorsed austerity measures. And proposed cuts to the pension system have driven French students, in typical fashion, apoplectic.

Courtney Martin in The American Prospect asks: “But why are the U.K. crowds almost 500 times as robust as those in the U.S.? Why does the American movement to fight tuition hikes and funding cuts remain so anemic in comparison?”

And she answers her question: “In no small part, it’s because privileged students at America’s colleges and universities generally don’t take the issue personally. Those who are politically active tend to set their sights on distant horizons—the poor in India, say, or the oppressed in Afghanistan.”

When the young and privileged take their “do-gooderism” abroad, they take a lot of the energy for local activism with them. Interesting rationale, but I don’t think it fully explains the discrepancy.

What best explains the dormancy on many college campuses is rooted in a national condition. The social value placed on universally accessible higher education has declined. College used to be dramatically less expensive because it was heavily subsidized by the state. The past few decades have seen “massive disinvestment.” In the accompanying time, the burden of financing higher education has shifted to the individual.

Or as Tom Hayden, one of the co-founders of Students for a Democratic Society, told me “The question for today’s student is not whether they can read Zinn, Anais Nin or Noam Chomsky, but whether they can afford to.”

Hayden added:

The challenges they (students) face on their campuses are far different than the past and perhaps more profound. Tuition costs at UM in 1960 were one hundred dollars, and I can’t remember if that was for a semester or an entire year. So I could obtain my degree, edit the paper, go south to the civil rights movement for two years, return and enter graduate school, and never feel I was falling behind in the competitive economic rat-race…A student today falls tens of thousands of dollars in debt, even after holding two part-time jobs, a burden which limits their career choices. Dropping out for social activism brings competitive disadvantage.

Public higher education is no longer seen as serving the broader social good. And if you can afford college—likely through high indebtedness—the four, five, or six years you’re there are spent making yourself more employable. Colleges aren’t enabling greater democratic citizenship anymore, they’re producing wage earners. There is a trend towards privatization and commoditization that’s quite troubling.

In 2009, the University of Virginia received a mere 8 percent of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30 percent from a quarter century ago. At the University of Wisconsin, only 19 percent comes from state dollars also down from 30 percent a decade ago. And at the University of Iowa, state appropriations have dropped by 35 percentage points since 1980. For comparison, since 1982 college tuition in the US has increased by 439 percent, more than four times the rate of inflation. Healthcare costs have risen 250 percent during the same period.

Students in the UK were protesting more than tuition cuts. Writing in the London Review of Books, Stefani Collini notes that:

Essentially, Browne is contending that we should no longer think of higher education as the provision of a public good, articulated through educational judgment and largely financed by public funds (in recent years supplemented by a relatively small fee element). … Britain’s universities, it is proposed, should henceforth operate in accordance with the tenets of perfect competition theory.

Nina Power, one of the student protestors, wrote in The Guardian that “It was a protest against the narrowing of horizons; a protest against Lib Dem hypocrisy; a protest against the increasingly utilitarian approach to human life that sees degrees as nothing but “investments” by individuals, and denies any link between education and the broader social good.”

In this light it’s not difficult to understand why the protests in Europe are so large and largely non-existent in the U.S. British students are fighting a transformation of their society that has long taken hold in the US.

Six Years to Earn a College Degree in the United States?

UK Protestor Dragged Out of His Wheelchair By Police (VIDEO)

Photo credit: adobemac
By Simeon Talley, Campus Progress blogger

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Steven J.

6:05PM PST on Feb 12, 2011

Hi All! http://www.thepetitionsite.com/2/help-end-minus-grading-affecting-gpa/

send a green star

Glenda S.

4:05PM PST on Feb 5, 2011

very good article..thank you

6:58AM PST on Jan 9, 2011

I disagree, Christa. Here in the U.S. we have perhaps the strongest and most vocal adherence to the principles of free speech and free expression of any nation in the world. Americans are decidedly a contentious lot when it comes to those things we don't like.

I think the difference between us and many European nations is that in the U.S. more of us tend to believe that the rest of our fellow taxpayers don't have an obligation to provide for everything we need and want in life. That if we want higher education for ourselves it's our own responsibility to pay for it.

Of course, the concept of self-sufficiency, even here in the U.S., is slowly going the way of the dodo bird and the passenger pigeon.

It's frightening how many things are becoming a 'right' nowadays. There's even a federal program (I believe it's federal) that pays for cell phones for low-income people. Since I guess people have a 'right' to a cell phone. Along with housing, food, medical/dental care, education, transportation, clothing.....

When I lived in Germany several decades ago I remember my German friends telling me how their tax dollars paid for workers to, every few years, go to a health spa for a 'rest cure'. What a great concept - vacations becoming a civil right.

Christa H.

10:47PM PST on Jan 8, 2011

I have pondered this as well. It isn't about the tuition especially. It's about the difference in Europeanreactions to injustance and how americans behave. We are taught at an early age not to "cause trouble", "don't raise your voice" "don't cause trouble" etc. etc. we are not allowed to express righteous anger or boundless joy for that matter. We must not show emotions. We are also not very healthy (I. e. less energy) due to bad food, water and air. Is it any wonder that we are such a violent society? Sometimes the pot boils over unfortunetly the pot has no direction.

Sharon Beth L.

2:32AM PST on Jan 4, 2011

I agree. My 78 year old father remembers a student demonstration when he was a student Brooklyn College apart of the then tuition free City of New York university system when a "registration fee" of $10 was implemented in 1950. I meyself remember when tuition board and expenses at a state college was $1000 a year altogether and even when I was in nursing school in community college i 1990 students (although not nursing students) protested a $200 semester increase. When people accept things as normal people are not outraged and do not protest.
Also because of the job situation students are too focused on getting good grades to get a job to think politically as the blogster implied

Brittany D.

11:41AM PST on Jan 2, 2011

So true. Even though I think it is important to help people in other countries, we really need to reform home first, so then we can focus on other countries.

Bob H.

11:35AM PST on Jan 2, 2011

The truth is, growing up in the 90's and 2000's in America, and now a college student at a private university, you just don't feel that the government cares about people; the government seems to still be a old man's corporation, hell-bent on making money for themselves and that is it. It does not matter who our president is, it is the Congress that needs a total attitude adjustment. I agree with some of other comments; the difference between Europe and America is that the European government has some sense of social responsibility to all its citizens, the American government does not. Also, the sad part about why I'm going to a private university is that it was less expensive after scholarships than any public university in my state. Education, along with much other the basic social welfare issues such as health care, is just sad in the United States

Nwabueze N.

6:00AM PST on Jan 2, 2011

Very informative-thank you.

Donna B.

9:12PM PST on Jan 1, 2011

I think Americans in general have become too complicit and complacent to protest. If we weren't so damn busy struggling to make ends meet and fighting with each other over various social and economic issues, then maybe we would have more interest, time and focus to protest things like college tuition hikes, rising gasoline prices, two costly wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, etc.

I'm convinced that even if a few people lift their voices in protest, then maybe, others might follow and we can affect some real positive change. We need to reclaim our mojo and take a stand!

Terry B.

11:25AM PST on Jan 1, 2011

Well in recent years Americans have gotten pretty wimpy about a lot of things. In almost any other country the election of 2000 would have gotten people into the streets across th nation and forcing regime change like they did in Ukraine, threw the ba$tards out with no bloodshed at all.

Think how our world would be without having had to experience Cheney and his stupid puppet, Dopey W for eight years.