iGeneration

Charlie Osborne
Home / News & Blogs / iGeneration

Students: 'Stop hiding, politicians'; Facebook as weapon

By | April 20, 2010, 7:59pm PDT

Summary: With social media as the Generation Y’s biggest weapon, it is being used to target politicians to come clean on university tuition fees before the election,

Students are demanding that politicians from all parties “come clean on tuition fees” in the run up to the general election on May 6th. With social media rocketing in this part of the decade, since the last election, it is pretty much all students have to share their feeling about this potential lack of access to study.

So far, all major parties and most parliamentary candidates have stated their position on raising the cap on tuition fees, which currently stands at around £3,300, but could raise to double or even more than that per year. However with the general election being less than exactly two weeks away, politicians are holding back on announcing these decisions until after the election - a major issue for students who want the opportunity to have their say in democratic means and electing those who won’t force them out of their degree programme.

The full, in-depth analysis of the student vs. politicians issue of tuition fees - a most excellent read - is on the BBC News website.

This is the first general election in the UK which has fully harnessed the power and functionality of instant communications, Facebook, social networking and media; just as the recent presidential election in the US which some argue may have resulted in Barack Obama getting in office.

So much social media has already erupted, with YouTube manifestos being published online, Twitter pages being set up, Facebook used to spread the message, and all in the name of getting through to the younger Generation Y. One prospective candidate was removed by their party for tweeting offensive comments, which ironically got far more airtime for Twitter than at any other point so far this year.

A similar trend is being seen with younger eligible voters, that Facebook and Twitter will have an absolutely unprecedented impact in the outcome - which at this point in time looks likely to be a hung parliament.

With all UK student voters - including mature, international, and part-time students - this is about 15% of all eligible voters in this upcoming general election, which may not seem like much, but it all counts in the local constituency.

Such cities including my own, Canterbury, but also Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Newcastle, have strong, lively yet crucial student voters which could turn the tables on the politicians. The National Union of Students has the Vote for Students campaign, asking students to vote for those who will plan to keep tuition fees as they are or scrap them altogether.

At the moment student voters have two options. The current opposition, the Conservative Party, are reluctant to share their views on tuition fee rises. Then again, as they don’t take into account those of a lesser class to themselves, such as working class background families (as I am from) then students simply won’t vote for them.

Or, they could publicly continue the social media and online action phenomenons by live slapping the respective party leaders as and when they annoy the electorate.

Are tuition fees too high? Should they go up, or stay as they are, or be scrapped altogether? How bigger impact will social media have on the election? Comment away.

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

More from “iGeneration”

Topics

Student, Tuition Fees, Generation Y, General Election, National Union of Students, University, Facebook, Twitter, Barack Obama, Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker, a criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Disclosure

Zack Whittaker

I worked briefly with Microsoft UK in 2006 but no longer have any connection with the company. Regardless, I remain impartial and unbiased in my views.

I don't hold any stock or shares, investments or industrial secrets in any company, but have signed confidentiality agreements with a number of UK and U.S. organisations, whose names I am not at liberty to disclose.

I was involved with Kent Union, the University of Kent's student union, undertaking voluntary, non-salaried, elected positions between early 2009 and mid-2010.

No other company, body, government department, non-governmental organisation or third sector organisation employs me or pays me a salary in any capacity whatsoever.

As a freelance journalist, whenever expenses are given and taken by a company that is not CBS Interactive, these will be disclosed in each relevant post to ensure transparency.

I currently work with a UK law enforcement unit, but this is an entirely separate position which bears no connection to other work.

(Updated: 23rd October 2011)

Biography

Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker, criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, UK, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

After studying criminology at university, though still in his early-20's, he has already had a series unconventional work and voluntary positions. He has worked with researchers studying neurological illnesses like Tourette's syndrome (which he suffers from), has given lectures on the nature of disabilities in the public community, and occasionally ends up speaking on television and radio discussing the events of the day.

He first had academic work published at the age of 22, then still an undergraduate, and has been cited by a wide range of publications: from the Huffington Post, Business Insider, AllThingsDigital, The Atlantic Wire and CBS News.

17
Comments
Add Your Opinion

Join the conversation!

Just In

good idea about facebook
gavin.chan 2nd Oct
A good post. Do you know tattoo? It is quite amazing. We supply kinds of tattoo kits, tattoo machines, tattoo needles, tattoo ink and so on. Please buy tattoo starter sets at wholesale price from us.unnAU
View in thread
0 Votes
+ -
Could almost be a US story
CobraA1 20th Apr 2010
Heh, could almost be a US story with those tuition
rates . . .
0 Votes
+ -
Students don't vote, no one will care.
No_Ax_to_Grind 21st Apr 2010
Just how it is.
0 Votes
+ -
Someone has to pay for it.
Henry Miller 21st Apr 2010
Apparently, Mr Whittaker's position is that the "someone" in question be anyone other than the students receiving the education.
0 Votes
+ -
Most ridiculous statement ever...
Dyndrilliac 21st Apr 2010
You are making an irrelevant appeal, which is a logical fallacy if I ever saw one. First of all, no one is suggesting that schools not get paid for providing students with an education. What is being taken as the issue here is what exactly are fair payments. Do you honestly believe that the current costs of education in relation to students have anything to do with the income of those who actually provide the education (School faculty, aides/interns, etc)?

America has a similar problem to the UK in terms of outrageous costs to attend college. Unless you have parents (or other relatives) that can pay, or qualify for scholarships and/or grants that account for the vast majority of the total cost, the only way for a student to get into a good school is to be swimming in a mountain of debt due to student loans. In fact, the vast majority of student tuition goes towards two primary resources: Textbooks and fees. The fees cover things like taxes, licenses for software/hardware used in libraries and computer labs, subscriptions to scholarly databases and journals for research, and other costs of the infrastructure the institutions try to offer to students (including the insurance schools must purchase in case students/faculty get hurt while on campus, and other administrative costs).

At first this seems like a good thing: schools offering students the tools they need to succeed, and in most part it is. However, there is a big problem to this system of the school passing on its infrastructure costs to students: these costs often aren't legitimate in the first place and the Educational system and Government are not doing enough to limit the commercial exploitation of this system by textbook publishers and other businesses designed to cater to both scholarly needs and the needs of a large computer networks being used by a school (software makers, database/journal paywall licenses, etc).

In this way, Education is not so different from Health-care. Costs will continue to rise, and the only end result in sight for students is that more of those rising costs will be passed onto them because for the most part Schools do actually do a good job of trying to mitigate costs as much as possible for students, but the corporate gluttons that exploit the Educational system's need for certain resources simply continue to milk more money by buying off all these politicians so they will continue to raise the cap whenever the financial bottom line starts to lag behind.
0 Votes
+ -
Oh, those evil corporations strike again.
Henry Miller Updated - 21st Apr 2010
Quel dommage!

I'm perfectly aware of how expensive higher education is--I've got three 13-y.o. kids and they'll all be heading of to university in a few more years. I expect educating the lot of them will cost me a total of on the order of half a million US dollars, and more if my daughter decides to go to medical school.

When you start demanding that "Government" do something about the costs of education, what you're basically saying is that, in addition to that $500k, you want government to tax me, or my British counterpart, to subsidise the education of the kids of some total stranger. How is that even remotely fair?
0 Votes
+ -
Ultimately, voters must fix this problem
kellycarter 21st Apr 2010
1. Dyndrilliac: What do you mean "tuition goes towards...textbooks and fees"? Textbooks and fees are paid separate from, and in addition to, tuition (at least in the US). Tuition is part of the revenue that pays the recurring costs of the institution. Depending on various factors, other revenue may come from the government (taxes), donors, grants, etc.

2. Dyndrilliac: What specific corporate gluttonly are you referring to that drives up the cost of education?

3. Henry Miller: "Fair" or not, it's generally understood that one role of government is to collect taxes to spend on programs--be it roads, defense, education, etc.--that generally are good for the nation as a whole. That does include providing public education--even for people that are complete strangers to you. The idea is that an educated population generally is good for all.

4. Zach and everybody else: Politicians should be open and honest about their intentions to raise, or not raise, tuition for public education. But don't hold your breath waiting on that. I just wish voters would hold those in elected office to setting aside money during good economic times for use during bad economic times. At least we could then mitigate the drastic budget cuts and tax increases that are so disruptive and damaging to us all.
0 Votes
+ -
Reply to both Henry and Kelly
Dyndrilliac 21st Apr 2010
@Henry Miller: I never mentioned taxing anyone. I am not suggesting that we subsidize education. I am suggesting that we do things to dramatically cut costs in such a way that is not only good for students and institutions, but also for allowing more of the revenue earned by institutions to go to providing an education as opposed to paying what amounts to extortion to research databases, journal publishers, volume software licenses, textbook publishers, and the other unnecessary and illegitimate expenses involved in providing the modern, robust, learning environment that our students need.

One road that has recently been employed by states like California has been the idea of 'open source textbooks.' Like open software has allowed school networks to become less dependent on inferior proprietary technologies like Blackboard (link: http://www.blackboard.com/) for instance, so too can open textbooks allow schools to break free of the stranglehold placed upon them by big publishing outfits like McGraw-Hill et al. The only other solution is to hire faculty that have written their own books (and thus do not need to license the right to provide copies to students), but honestly; have you ever taken a class from a teacher who wrote the book they are teaching from? That is by far the most unbearable situation college has to offer.

@kellycarter: To your first bullet-point, I did not know we were playing the semantics game; I thought we were having an adult conversation about Education. However, you are right; I lumped them all together, and I did it purposefully. However, my intention was not to create a straw man - I simply did not think I needed to break down all the costs by category and delineate them like an accountant. We don't need to speak legalese here, after all it's just comments on a blog.

To your second point, I thought I made it pretty clear (if not in my first comment, then surely in my second in reference to Henry) that I believe that the costs endured by institutions that they have no choice but to pass on in some form to the student are artificially inflated to serve corporate financial interests instead of being about providing a quality education at a price average people can afford. I've also specifically mentioned several specific costs that I consider to fall under that category and how they are all necessary to providing a good education. One of the biggest costs in an educational institutions day-to-day operations are it's computer network; and not just lab computers in libraries and classrooms, but also work computers used by faculty and administration. All these computers need software, otherwise their just big fancy paper-weights with flashy buttons. That software has to be licensed (although, institutional piracy is a big problem today, precisely out of necessity in some cases), and those licenses cost a lot, and have to be renewed. In addition, imagine a different license for every major software product. Windows. Office. Visual Studio for the Computer Science students alone is thousands of dollars (the retail price for the Professional version for one person alone is over a thousand dollars). Switch to Linux, OpenOffice (or Google Apps for that matter), and Code::Blocks or something like that, and you've cut annual costs by probably fifty thousand dollars or more depending on the size of the institution and for how many users the license had to be able to provide software.
0 Votes
+ -
Oops! My previous reply was to Story instead of Message
kellycarter 21st Apr 2010
Dyndrilliac: I can tell you're passionate about this subject--great! It's an important issue. My "pickiness" about the terminology comes from spending 10 years working at a university. The terminology really needs to be more precise to "have an adult conversation" about educational costs. Otherwise we end up arguing over misunderstandings about what we're talking about.

If I may reverse nit-pick, you and I may be focused on different costs again, in that I believe the vast majority of costs in a university go to labor costs of faculty and staff. Same as in almost every business. The IT costs you mention pale in comparison. But possibly you are referring to non-labor costs.

Anyhow, I think we all agree that costs for education should be as low as humanly possible to allow deserving students a chance to reach their highest potential and to "give back" to whomever had to help pay for it.

Thanks for the discussion.
0 Votes
+ -
Correction
Dr. John 21st Apr 2010
You may be unaware of this, as most people who don't deal with higher education aren't, but Microsoft has excellent programs for students, including low cost/no cost access to Windows, Office, Server products, Visual Studio, etc...

Switching to Linux when virtually any company they'll walk into after graduation is running Windows, and you've not only set them up for failure, you've virtually guaranteed them as being unhirable.

And, until OO or GA makes greater headway in the corporate world, the same goes for substituting anything for Office.

Students MUST be trained on what they'll be using.

You don't train a big-rig diesel truck mechanic by having them work on chainsaws and lawnmowers.
0 Votes
+ -
Reply to both Kelly and Dr. John
Dyndrilliac 21st Apr 2010
@kellycarter: But how would you lower the costs spent paying the faculty? The average salary for a Professor in Florida (where I am from) is between 55 and 80 thousand per year, depending on experience, tenure, and responsibilities, and we are losing valuable educators at many State institutions specifically because the job already doesn't have pay that justifies the costs of the education in order to teach at this level in the first place, which is only serving to fuel the downward spiral. I am referring to costs that can actually be lowered with reasonably simple solutions.

@Dr. John: I am aware of some of Microsoft's programs, in particular Dreamspark (link: https://www.dreamspark.com/default.aspx). However, that particular program and many others like it require students to personally obtain the software themselves from a special download site and install it on their own personal machines as part of the EULA. That program does not serve to help educational institutions get multi-license copies for use in a client/server model network for their own machines to use.

Also, what are you talking about with people trained on open software being unhirable? Are you suggesting that someone who learns how to use OpenOffice can't use Microsoft Office? Or, Apple iWorks for that matter? That's ridiculous. Sure, the UI's are a little different, but the main functionality is the same. Same goes for Windows; anyone who knows how to use Linux won't have a problem using a Windows PC. It's the Windows users who are spoiled and can't seem to work software/hardware that doesn't have a nice little animated paperclip to tell them what to do. The fact of the matter is, if the students are trained right, it wont' matter what they are using. The whole point of teaching the students is not so they can just use what is out there today but they can also with little effort pick up the new technologies that come out in the future. Also, your argument might have more bite if Linux and Windows were as different as diesel engines and lawnmowers. The fact of the matter is you can even develop for both platforms with ease using practically the same code base now since Mono ports .NET support to Linux.
0 Votes
+ -
Role of government
Henry Miller 21st Apr 2010
If I had any reasonable expectation that the value of the education subsidised by government was worth the cost, I might agree with you.

I live in an area with three major universities and a big handful of smaller schools. For various reasons, I had and have frequent contact with a fair number of the students of theses various schools, and am almost universally unimpressed. For far too many kids, college just seems to be a way to put off getting a job.
0 Votes
+ -
TANSTAAFL!
Dr_Zinj 21st Apr 2010
-nt-
0 Votes
+ -
Thanks for clarification
kellycarter 21st Apr 2010
Dyndrilliac: I can tell you're passionate about this subject--great! It's an important issue. My "pickiness" about the terminology comes from spending 10 years working at a university. The terminology really needs to be more precise to "have an adult conversation" about educational costs. Otherwise we end up arguing over misunderstandings about what we're talking about.

If I may reverse nit-pick, you and I may be focused on different costs again, in that I believe the vast majority of costs in a university go to labor costs of faculty and staff. Same as in almost every business. The IT costs you mention pale in comparison. But possibly you are referring to non-labor costs.

Anyhow, I think we all agree that costs for education should be as low as humanly possible to allow deserving students a chance to reach their highest potential and to "give back" to whomever had to help pay for it.

Thanks for the discussion.
0 Votes
+ -
TANSTAAFE? (nt)
Henry Miller 21st Apr 2010
..
0 Votes
+ -
TANSTAAFE
psikeyhackr 24th Jul 2010
There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free E-book

Books take TIME to read. Time is more important than money.
0 Votes
+ -
good idea about facebook
gavin.chan 1st Oct
A good post. Do you know tattoo? It is quite amazing. We supply kinds of tattoo kits, tattoo machines, tattoo needles, tattoo ink and so on. Please buy wholesale tattoo kitsat wholesale price from us.NDqOT
0 Votes
+ -
good idea about facebook
gavin.chan 2nd Oct
A good post. Do you know tattoo? It is quite amazing. We supply kinds of tattoo kits, tattoo machines, tattoo needles, tattoo ink and so on. Please buy tattoo starter sets at wholesale price from us.unnAU

Join the conversation!

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]
ie8 fix

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources
ie8 fix