Dear students who want a refund

The President of the NUS, Zamzam Ibrahim, has called for students to get a refund on their tuition fees for the current year, or the opportunity to repeat the year at no further cost. I have a lot of sympathy with this position: students have been severely disrupted this year, with a sudden lockdown in mid-March following waves of strike action over this year and previous years. Their graduation ceremonies have been cancelled or postponed, and the graduate jobs market they’re going into is in crisis. 

Refunds are something you get when you haven't been given the product or the service that you paid for. The possibility of – and call for – a refund therefore comes with the introduction of student fees, and the shift to the students-as-customers model. This same model has led to the increasing cuts, more-for-less, and rising precarity we've been protesting against lately (and therefore to the strikes themselves).  

A refund for most UK students would need to be paid against their student debt. They take out a loan to cover their fees and living costs, and it’s paid back once they start earning over a threshold. So they haven’t actually paid anything up front; the government gives universities some amount of money according to how many students they have. Therefore, for these students, a refund really means writing off a year of student debt (which is what Ibrahim has asked for). So who should bear the cost of this? Would universities be asked to pay back that money, or would the government cover it in the same way that it is supposedly covering a proportion of salary for furloughed staff? 

An important consideration here is that universities are broke. I’m not for a moment suggesting that students should bail out universities, but it is also true that many universities just don’t have the money to pay this refund (maybe £54m at my place, according to my back-of the-envelope calculation), if they were required to. Hundreds of staff are about to lose their jobs in order to make cost savings at my institution; refunds would presumably mean more job losses, so it’s us who would be paying the cost of these refunds with our livelihoods. 

Should students get a full refund for the year? I think that it would make more sense for it to be a choice between a full refund and retaking the year without penalty, or a partial refund or compensation. How that amount is determined, I don’t know. Staff have worked unbelievably hard to make sure that teaching and the various support services have continued during the coronavirus, so it’s not the case that students haven’t had any teaching or support, but it has been different from what they would normally have had (online teaching is not at all the same as face-to-face). There are also some students who can’t access it, because they’re in a different time zone or don’t have internet at home or any number of other reasons. We’re making concessions for these circumstances, of course, so it’s hard to determine just how much detriment there has been. 

The other thing is about what students are actually paying for. There is a common belief that they’re just paying for their lectures, and of course this isn’t true. They (and other income sources) are paying for the library, the sports centre, classroom upkeep, new buildings, campus maintenance, the salaries of the senior management (and everyone else), and lots more. Again, it’s hard to judge how much of this they’ve been able to benefit from during this time - not the sports centre or the classrooms, of course, but much of the library holdings are online, for instance, and the staff there have been working hard throughout to make them more accessible. 

As noted before, universities have become a consumer product due to the various changes to the system - students paying fees directly, the lifted cap on numbers, and so on, all meaning that it now looks much like a transaction where you pay your money and you get the degree you paid for, on the understanding that you have to put some work in - like with a gym membership. But with most consumer transactions, there’s a clear definition of what the customer is paying for, and sometimes a contract. If you buy a handmade jumper from me, you’re not paying the cost of the jumper plus my time to make it - you’re paying a price that I think you’ll be willing to pay that covers a proportion of the money I need to live on, so you’re also paying for my food, bills, glass of wine, new coat, etc. But there is a clear agreement that if you pay this money, you get a jumper of good quality that matches what you expected. If I can’t provide the jumper because of a wool shortage, I can’t say ‘look, you’re also paying for my bills and those don’t stop when there’s a wool shortage so you still have to pay, and I’ll send you images of my jumper while you wear one you already own’. OK, this is facetious, but my point is that if we’re going to make universities into this business-focussed entity, we have to face up to the fact that the customers are going to demand the product they paid for. 

If you’re a student and you think you should get a refund, I hope you can see the link between this and the reasons we were on strike. We’re protesting exactly the situation that has led us to this mess now because it just isn’t good for students or staff. I support you in your demand for a refund, but in return, please support local campaigns against compulsory redundancies, otherwise you’re asking your lecturers, your wellbeing team, and the receptionist to pay for your refund. You’re an adult; don’t lash out at the nearest person, wailing ‘it’s not fair’ – look for who is accountable. In this case, it’s a raft of bad decisions by successive governments, and inaction by Universities. Make them pay.