At the same time SYL, the National Union of University Students in Finland has also posted their stance in a blog entry. It is fairly encouraging that they also essentially say that while they to an extent understand why the discussion has erupted in this way, they view the student subsidies in a similar fashion as other social benefits: they should be aimed at the people who in fact need support and shouldn't be treated as "reward".
Another interesting point in their post were the costs they had calculated which will arise from various types of changes to the system. You can find the details from the post, but to give some perspective to the discussion, the overall costs arising from supporting students run in the range of 800 million per year. The demands that the students are now putting forth would cost an additional 300 million per year. To contrast this, more targeted changes to e.g. support students with children by increasing their allowance by 145 euros per month would cost in the region of 23 million per year. This type of change I can agree with as I can imagine that supporting a family with children during your studies is something which demands not only time, but also resources in a completely different way than being single.
A friend of mine also linked an interesting article from Canada, where some people had talked to the local Occupy movement. Combine this article with another one on how college has been oversold and a picture starts emerging. I recall I've previously blogged about how the education system will be in turmoil and how essentially inefficient it is to run a system to highly educate people who end up doing routine tasks which don't essentially need high education only to provide businesses with one criteria with which to filter applicants with. Of course it's nice to give everyone a university education, but ultimately I think people should put into perspective what the education actually is and what the impacts realistically will be on their lives. It's completely ridiculous to assume that merely obtaining a university degree will automatically guarantee bliss. There's always a certain amount of shoveling excrement involved in establishing yourself and your career and, let's face it, with the increased amount of uncertainty on every level in the world, chances of failing a couple of times are fairly high.
This in fact links back to the original discussion on income thresholds in respect to student allowances. The system is a social welfare system meant to ensure that people are able to survive. Think of it as an air bag. The intention of the system isn't to provide you with a comfortable setup with which you can cruise through life without having to compete and create value. The purpose is to ensure that if you crash, you stay alive and can get back up again. If air bags in cars provided a near 100% survival rate and also provided a very comfortable pillow, there wouldn't be much of an incentive to be too careful in traffic as the worst-case scenario would involve a comfortable nap after and collecting insurance money...
In fact, amusingly enough in Finland students are very risk averse and tend not to even finance their studies with debt or if they do, it is only to a very limited extent. This means that unlike the people in the Occupy protests, graduating Finns very often have little or no debt to speak of, so from that perspective as well I think what will happen is that the demands will not be met with on any level and that the silly movement of greedy students will gradually deflate when people hopefully realize how silly the bitching and moaning actually is. But that still leaves the question of what exactly is the value and use of university education today and how will it be repositioned as it is increasingly clear that the landscape has changed in such a drastic way that the old system is very much ill-positioned and the drift must be addressed in some way. Hopefully it will be done intelligently, but I'm not putting my money on the politicians being able to do anything good with it.
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