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ARTWORK: Eliza Williams
Selling Out By Degrees Isaac Ewald I’m trying to imagine my graduation. I won’t be there, but I can picture the line of unfamiliar faces, a smattering of friends and casual acquaintances. Each person is carrying their own jumbled collection of experiences in identical UNSW branded baskets. Up ahead a cashier in dignified robes checks our payment has gone through and, failing to even glance in the basket, hands over the receipt. There it goes, did you catch it? The whole point. My purpose here, with this tortured metaphor, is to make a roundabout case that university should be free. There are many better arguments for this but having finished a bachelor’s degree at the University of New South Wales (a
university which seems to be eating itself) this is the one I am well positioned to make. A degree has to be more than a product you buy. As attending university is increasingly seen through the logic of self-investment rather than education, its value is disappearing even as its price increases. What do I mean by a ‘logic of selfinvestment’? Most of us have a sense, more or less vague, of the changes to Australia’s university system since the 1980’s. Reduced public funding, increasingly casualised staff, the introduction of fees. More recently the reliance on ‘exporting’ education to international students who, in 2020 particularly, receive extremely poor treatment at the hands of both governments and universities.
