Places and forms of power : universities

For the notion of places and forms of power, we have been working on the theme of university. If I was to define power, it would go as the ability or official capacity to exercise control or authority over a person, a group of people or a geographical area. Therefore, this notion concerns the ways this power is executed on a certain location and the impact it has on the common and individual scale. Going back to our theme, we can ask ourselves to what extent does a specific form of power influence in selection for higher education: money. I will start off by explaining why money is a form of power, afterwards I will deploy what power it grants to students, and at last the reach of this power.

I- We live in a world that revolves around money; most of our concerns are related to it. It can also cause division; for example, the document ‘’for or against the rise of tuition fees?’’ is an article that shows the two main positions on the rise of tuition fees in the UK.

On one side, we have a girl who is against it and fears that with the rise on tuition fees, degrees would only be a sign of economic power rather than the reward of one’s effort. On the other side, a guy justifies this measure by stating that this rise is necessary to have more equality on the level of the different universities. For him, the fact that one could get a well-paid job after going to college is a fair enough justification to pay a large sum.

II - Which leads to my second part in which I will talk about the power university grants to students. Once students get the chance of going to university and graduate, a larger range of possibilities is given to them. In fact, they can generally choose between multiple work offers that are significantly better paid than those available for people who did not attend college. They also get the power of knowledge, which is actually what university is meant for. The motto of the Harvard University on the flag of the first document we saw, which reads “veritas”, is the latin word for truth; the knowledge that students get from university is the universal truth that will enrich them as human beings, and have ambitions that go beyond materiality.

III - Sadly, the chance of living this life-fulfilling university experience is often out of reach. The video ‘’I don’t care what it costs’’ sums up pretty well the struggle of many young people who have to pay the huge amounts of money they owe for their studies. Some of them don’t have any idea of how or when they will be covering their debt. Stats on the situation show that tuition fees were about 5 times higher in 2008 than 30 years before in the US, and that they are 3 times higher than average family income. Despite the existence of public universities in the US, they are still expensive (up to 14 thousand dollars per year). All of this contributes for high tuition fees to get standardized. In some rare cases, students, like Crystal from the document “how I avoided student loans”, have the chance of getting out of high school without any debts to pay. She received different types of helps like scholarships, but still, it was not enough at all to cover her debt as she had to have multiple part-time jobs and get economic help from her parents. It is meant to be a success story and a proof that if she could do it, others can too but actually it just shows how ridiculously expensive it is and how

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