By charging students, they value their education more.

The argument

This argument concerns the effect of price on attitude rather than the effect of fees on access. Its starting premise is a general one about how people regard what they obtain: cost changes the way we perceive an object, and something acquired at a price is attended to differently from something received at none. Applied to higher education, the claim is that tuition fees give a student a personal stake in their own studies, and that the stake alters how the studies are treated. The evidence offered is a change in how students are regarded. Previously students had a bad reputation as lazy, alcoholic layabouts — a characterisation that assumed university was a deferral of responsibility rather than an investment in it. That reputation, proponents argue, belonged to a period in which the course cost the student nothing directly, so there was no particular penalty for treating it lightly. Once fees are charged the calculation changes, because the time spent idle is time that has been paid for. The mechanism proposed is pressure. With increased debt comes an increased pressure to succeed both academically and in one's subsequent career, since the debt has to be justified by what the degree yields. A student carrying that obligation has a reason to extract value from the teaching available, to attend, and to treat a poor result as a loss rather than an inconvenience. The result may therefore be that students today are more driven and more inclined to push themselves academically in order to make the most of the money they are spending. On this reasoning fees are not merely a way of funding universities but a way of improving what happens inside them. Because charging students makes them value their education more, the UK should charge for access to its higher education institutions.

Context

Humans tend to value what has a higher financial cost, as a result students may take higher education more seriously because of the increased cost.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Student's attitudes may not be the result of tuition fee changes, but the result of various factors such as the images portrayed in social media of 'perfect' lives and an increased importance placed on having a financially lucrative career.

Rejecting the premises

Premise two may not be the direct result of premise one.