Written by: By Yvonne Ossei
The fear of educational debt is now so tangible in the U.K
that you could cut it with a knife, and feed pieces of it back to the Secretary
of State for Education.
Okay tuition fees have gone up. I know this, because besides
everything else I do, I am a full time student. Tuition fees for home (non
international) students have soared from around £3000 per year on average, to
around £9000 per year. Some students do not feel as though they can
afford to take out the student loans to cover the costs, and then end up with
large debts at the end of the 3-5 years of their degree programme. It would
seem as though desperation is driving some of them into the prostitution
industry, and all for the sake of paying their fees.
If I cast my mind back to the nineties, I can remember
images of delirious young women in America, on the Ricki Lake and Jerry
Springer shows, insisting that the only way they could put themselves through
university was to have sex for money. It baffled me back then, and I’m still
curious about the idea of it today. “Go Get a job at McDonald’s” the
crowd would jeer, but the young women, resilient to all reason, would shake
their heads until their wigs fell off. Additionally, they were always wearing
garish make-up and sunglasses in an effort to disguise their identities.
All to no avail, because anyone that knew them well enough, would know who they
were, underneath the accidental Halloween costumes. I’m guessing they
returned to lectures on the Monday morning, to quite a few suspicious glances from
people in the room.
We can compare those stories to what is happening now in the
U.K. The increase in tuition fees and fear of debt is possibly what made young
women in England seek financial assistance from an organization called as
Sponsor A Scholar. Judging from media reports, the company may have been in
operation during sometime in 2012. Forty-year-old Mark Lancaster who posed as a
scholar from a top British university set it up. He stated that he could
match the young women up with wealthy “sponsors” that would pay as much as
£15000 a year in scholarships. In return the girls would have intimate
liaisons with their sponsors. Lancaster “assessed” the women before he would
let them join the books, and that consisted of taking them to a nearby flat and
having sex with them, whilst he recorded it, with hidden cameras. What ever
happened to exams as a form of assessment?
The women never received any remuneration from Lancaster or
anyone else, because it was a fake company. Lancaster used it as a way of
having sex with various women. He possibly observed the nation’s hysteria about
the increase in tuition fees and guessed that young women would be desperate
enough to sign up to his would-be organization. He guessed correctly.
Since then I have heard people argue that, had Lancaster actually ran it
as a legitimate company, he would have made a huge fortune. Something tells me
that they are also correct.
Academics from Kingston and Leeds universities conducted a
study into the student sex work phenomenon, across 29 U.K. higher education
institutions and made a number of key findings. Lead by Dr Ron Roberts, it
revealed that 6% of students (which could equate to around 149, 000 pupils,
based on the 2013 HESA student figures) may be part time sex workers. According
to The Independent’s Jonathan Brown, the research was published in the Sex
Education journal, and stipulates that higher education institutions could be
making up to £355 million annually, or £2.15m per institution, from the sex
industry.
If universities are aware that young women are supposedly in
dire straits, why aren’t they addressing these problems? Would it mean a
temporary shortfall in their profits? Or perhaps, they don’t believe that there
is a genuine issue. Perhaps they believe that students don’t have legitimate
reasons to undertake sex work, and it is simply a lazy and easy way out of
debt.
If students wilfully prefer, or enjoy sex work compared to
other forms of labour, then that is another matter altogether. That being
said, I think we can safely assume that home students don’t actually need to
engage in sex work to pay their tuition fees. After all what is the worst that
can happen when you take out a student loan?
For a start you are only obligated to repay student loans if
you are in a job, and earning more than £21’000 a year. Nor will you have to
repay them, in the event of you needing to register a permanent disability.
According to Monster.co.uk, the average U.K salary for a
woman is around £24’000 per annum. This amounts to a repayment of just £30 a
month of student loans, as per the government’s repayment schedule. Now isn’t
that a really small price to pay, compared to a lifetime of recurring
nightmares, that remind you that you used to sleep with bald, sweaty, creepy
old men to make ends meet? Because, rest assured, the men who are going to pay
you for your services won’t look like Ben Affleck or Denzel Washington.
If in the worse case scenario, you pass away before you
finish repaying Student Loans, they will cancel the debt. They won’t
posthumously revoke your degree because you never finished paying for it. And
you would have still have had the benefit of your degree and education, whilst
you were alive.
In my mind, the tuition loan is a better debt, than taking
out a hire purchase (HP) on a car, which many people in the country have no
reservations about doing. I am guessing it is because people will see them in
their nice cars first, and think about their qualifications later. The world’s
economy is built on debt. Very few people are able to pay for their houses,
cars, or even their holidays upfront. Many payments are spread out over the
course of several years, or a lifetime, for things like mortgages. However
people still survive, and I think that you will too.
About the writer
Yvonne Ossei’s blog, brings you her take on some of the
social political issues of the modern day. Yvonne is an actress and trained in
BA Acting at East 15 Acting School. She has featured in several theatre
productions, and films.
She is also an award-winning scriptwriter, and wrote a play
titled ‘Face Up’ based on the issues surrounding Female Genital Mutilation
(FGM). Her scripts have been performed at Channel 4 Studios in London, and The
Pleasance Theatre, amongst others.Yvonne has also written several films which
are in production.
She has produced and presented a weekly Entertainment Show
on Meridian Radio, and has been a voice over artist for an animated programme.
She also writes on the AOL News website, Huffington Post
U.K.
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