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Comment by ozlikethewizard | Hacker News Reader

The whole debacle in UK higher education is the governments own making. It demamded universities operate more like businesses, their funding has been hugely slashed in real terms over the decades, and now its shocked when they priotise sources of income over educating british nationals? The government could fix this mess in a myriad of ways but levying a tax against the unis is not one of them. This is kicking a dying horse.

Im certainly a bit biased as I work in higher education, but I also see first hand the sorry state of affairs successive governments have left their golden "world leading universities" in.

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> priotise sources of income over educating british nationals

Education has always been an investment. Tax puts money in education, the country gains in reduced poverty, increased safety, better mental health, etc.

To think about education as a way to earn money was absurd from the beginning. But when billionaires run a country is what you get. Margaret Thatcher started a trend to lie to the public and brainwash them on thinking that public investment is waste. The country is harvesting the lies that she planted. And children and teenagers will get the worse part of it. Sadly, many people still believe in the lies of conservatives and change is difficult when so many people has magical thinking (stop investing, cut taxes, and somehow money will rain from the sky).

To be fair, this happened all across the western world. The US with Reagan, Germany with Kohl and Schröder, and many other countries followed the same path.

Prior to that, neoliberal think tanks have been working for almost decades to prepare the dismantling of the public institutions.

I don't want to absolve Kohl here but personally this sounds like it at most had paved the way. I only started university in 2003, without any fees, and then they were introduced (so 4-5 years after the Kohl era), and then scrapped again as well.

And it somehow worked out well for them, nowadays they got a quite captive voters population.

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