Zack Polanski is right about student loan crisis

Zack Polanski and the Green party are right: university should be free. It is beneficial for all of society to have citizens educated to a higher level. Wealth taxes could help rebalance the economy towards education.

Zack Polanski: ‘outrageous’

In 2024, Polanski said:

University should be a right and not a privilege, and I thinks it’s outrageous that we have tuition fees at all, never mind them going up and up and up.

For the 2025/26 year, Labour has increased tuition fees by 3.1% to £9,535 per year. Before Tony Blair introduced tuition fees in 1998, university was free for over 50 years proving that the current system of students paying to contribute to society is ideological.

Indeed, Norway, Germany, Iceland, Finland, Austria, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, Greece and even Scotland all have free university.

The Green party says:

Education should be about inspiring a love of learning and ensuring that every young person can reach their potential. Yet too many… are failing to thrive in an education system that operates like a production line rather than valuing their individual qualities. An investment in the next generation is the most important investment we can make.

The Greens pledge to restore grants and end tuition fees.

‘Racket’

Faiza Shaheen, who Keir Starmer blocked from being a Labour candidate in 2024, said on the BBC:

Its an absolute racket… in so many ways we’ve privatised our public sector, and that’s also happened with our student loans… What’s happened to our student loans and the way it’s been handed over to make money out of in this way that is so deeply unfair and results in a lot of inequalities because the rich don’t have to take out these loans…

The idea that young people working year after year, paying off the debt apparently but actually not… but paying off the interest 

The joke of student loans is that people on average incomes who are paying it back aren’t at all because the interest is higher than what they can pay monthly.

Now a nurse, Helen Lambert told the Guardian:

It is so disheartening to have this level of debt hanging over you with no achievable way to clear it or even reduce it while they add on upwards of £400 a month in interest.

Why are we charging students when they are going to save our lives within the NHS? Or become engineers, psychotherapists or reseachers? Or develop themselves to critique and improve society through subjects like philosophy?

That said, there are ridiculous degrees that the public sector should not fund. For instance, in the UK one can study surf science and technology, floral design, hand embroidery and the psychology of fashion. Fundamental degrees should be the priority.

Publicly funded univesity is a no brainer.

Featured image via the Canary