Oh dear lord, it's that time of the year again when the liberal arts students get their undies in a knot and decide that they're being treated very unfairly because they only get free education, free money, free healthcare, and to a fair degree the freedom to earn some money before the benefits begin to gradually get decreased as a function of income. A year or few back the cry was to adjust the allowance and housing subsidies upwards, and yes, to an extent there was a point in that: over a course of a decade or two the other social benefits given to poor had gone up but the students had been neglected. But that wrong was set right and the allowances were raised.
Now in the time of austerity measures and hell in the labor market the free-money loving (ok, who doesn't love free money...) students have decided that it is unfair that in some circumstances if they've earned too much, they are asked to return a part of the payouts handed to them in the form of allowances and housing subsidies (check out my post from September 2010 on financing studies for detailed calculations on how wealthy students actually can be before getting slowly cut off...). So a virtual mob of irrational (in a systemic sense, but on a personal level they are of course very rational for being greedy) students has showed up demanding various things. In fact the demands are not quite clear and in the good nature of Occupy Wall Street, it may have something to do with the fact that they are grumpy because they feel entitled to something and the universe has given them the middle finger. But unlike in the case of the Americans, in Finland the situation is ridiculously good for the students.
Apparently the demands are two-folded. Firstly the students feel that the limits for how much they can earn before they start losing benefits need to be raised. In practice the current situation is that you can live off of about 20k or so per year of income and benefits before you are cut completely off. To be honest, with that amount of money I don't frankly think that you should be subsidized. You're already given free healthcare from a dedicated foundation which focuses only on students and what is in practice a free university education. I think that after you are making 20k a year as a student, you can stand on your own two feet without the need for extra subsidies.
The second point which seems even more outrageous, and this seems to divide the students, is that they feel they are unjustly being punished in the form of taxes for working during the semester. I don't know who came up with this mind fart, but I don't think it needs any more countering. Of course it would be quite nice for me to abuse my unlimited (time-wise) student status and get my income tax-free for the rest of my life in Finland. Yeah...
Of course the Finnish student support system isn't bad, as can be easily proven by just looking at the amount of support and comparing it with other countries. That isn't to say that there aren't problems in the system. One valid point is that in certain cases students need to optimize their earnings so they don't go over certain threshold limits. In practice it is possible that by going over a limit by 200 euros on a yearly level will result in you having to pay back 500 euros. But again, this problem has nothing to do with the demands the students are making. This is merely a matter of having threshold levels instead of merely implementing a linear model of decreasing benefits, which I guess could be rather easily implemented.
Another problem is that the argument that life on merely the student allowance and housing subsidies is impossible in certain regions of Finland, e.g. Helsinki, where the housing costs are so high that only a small portion of the allowances are left to be disposed to non-housing related costs. If students actually take out a loan and/or do even a minimum amount of work on the side, the situation, however, isn't all that bad as can be seen from the calculations I referred to earlier. But if something must be done, I think it would potentially be ok to adjust the benefits at the lower end of the spectrum, i.e. give support to those who need it the most. But again, this is not what the students are demanding. They are demanding that they be rewarded for performing their studies.
Think about the logic of the demand a bit. It is essentially the same as saying that it is ok to cut social benefits from the lowest classes based on arbitrary criteria such as them having an alcohol problem and failing to show up for meetings but at the same time arguing that people who make, say 100k or more a year contribute in such great fashion to the economy and society that they should be given free money in the form of allowances and housing subsidies. That makes no sense at all and considering that people who are being educated at university levels in e.g. social sciences fail to see this flaw just begs the question of whether free education and all student subsidies should be cut altogether as apparently the years and years of state-subsidized education has still kept people at a, shall we say, intellectually handicapped level despite all efforts.
Sorry, I may have been quite harsh, but honestly I am disgusted by the blatant greed behind this.
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