One of the big moral fears in Australia has long been that we’re becoming too American with how we go about our social and economic structuring. This is of particular note given the widespread financial failings of the modern US capitalist system thanks, in large part, to reckless economic policy from the private sector.
One of the other great fears covered by this is the idea of moving to a more American style of higher education, where fee structuring is set by the individual schools, with the cost of education ranging from the difficult-to-obtain, through to the astronomically expensive, depending on the school and its inherent perceived quality. Students wind up saddled with mountainous debt that they then spend enormous portions of their lives attempting to pay off – a scale of time totally out-of-step with the time actually spent at college in the first place.
In Australia, the recent Federal Budget heralded the onset of University Fee Deregulation, meaning that for the first time, higher education institutions will be able to set their own price points for their courses. Combine this with the removal of funding, and we’re about to enter an era where University education will be far more expensive, and thus perceived as less accessible to everyone. Student debt, in this country, is on the cusp of skyrocketing.
Enter, the one, the only, the great voice of reason, John Oliver. On this week’s edition of Last Week Tonight, Oliver tackles the astonishing levels of student debt in America, along with another dangerous (eventual, potential) by-product of an education system with a deregulated fee structure: the For-Profit University.
It’s truly frightening stuff, particularly when you get to the part about sending nursing students to Church of Scientology facilities to undertake a psychiatric swing.
I don’t want to say that it’s a guaranteed sign of things to come out here, but at the very least it’s a stark cautionary tale. Those who don’t learn from mistakes, after all…
