Interview: Cardiff Uni’s Socialist Society speaks out about latest tuition fees increase

Cardiff University’s Socialist Society has spoken out against the government’s increase of tuition fees.

In the build-up to the UK Government’s budget proposal at the end of October this year, the Socialist Party introduced a “Funding Not Fees” campaign to fight for free education, for living grants, not loans, to end low pay and insecure employment, and to stop all education cuts and course closures.

Since the new budget in October, the Welsh Government has confirmed that tuition fees are set to rise for the second time this year to £9,535 at the start of the next academic year.

Speaking with The Cardiff Tab, Aris Prevost, the president of Cardiff Socialist Students Society, said that “the decline in students attending universities is not helped in any meaningful way by Starmer’s plan to raise tuition fees. He’s not cutting funding for education, but just giving enough money to solve the deficits universities are facing”.

In response to the rise in tuition fees, the society has proposed a unique solution: The democratisation of universities.

“Starmer has kind of indicated that there will be a continuous rise [in fees], and so we can expect tuition fees to keep on the rise with inflation… putting us in even more debt,” said Aris.

“In his election race, he put a lot of emphasis on education and why it’s important… but then if you look at the budget document and you do a word search for the term university, it comes up twice in the entire document, which is wild.”

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Aris added that the group thinks there is enough “wealth in the UK to be able to fix these issues” and that to achieve this democratisation, universities will need to “scrap the marketisation of universities and allow staff members and students to run the universities, instead of shareholders and profit.

“The workers and students would be able to make decisions that would impact the university and its courses, which would involve committees where the workers would have a strong voice in making key decisions that are focused on the workers and students themselves, not just people who want the university to make a profit,” he said.

Aris added that including students in these meetings would “have a direct impact on what the university does, whether they are changing courses, adding new ones, or investing. The committees right now have no student representation and if they do have students on them, they probably don’t have any significant sway.”

They continued by saying: “The money that we invest into our university, our tuition fees, should be used for the benefit of the student population and the staff as well.

“The university system is crumbling. We’re not going to say: ‘Oh if we do nothing it’ll be fine.’ If nothing happens or if no radical kind of action takes place to save universities, I truly do believe that… it will be a miserable place to get an education. So, something needs to happen.”