Its almost invisible, but the transformation of education from a human right to a commodity is one of the greatest threats of our time. We have to question the language that promotes inequality, writes Elisabeth Gehrke. 
There is no specific politician responsible for this. There is no one person you can go and shake a fist at. In fact a large part of the responsibility falls on our shoulders. We all have to become more aware of when economistic and quantitative rhetoric is used to hide an ideological agenda.
Not only is this language dangerous to higher education but it is also dangerous to science as whole. Using language to trick people into supporting political decisions breeds distrust in society between those who understand the language and those who do not. It causes distrust in quantifiable sciences.
For instance when the EU Commission argues for “cost-sharing” in higher education what they mean is that there should be more tuition fees and in turn debt. And this problem is not limited to higher education. Recently the Swedish migration minister spoke about asylum seekers in terms of “volumes”. But people are not “volumes”, they are people.
This language is used to make reforms seem technical and inevitable. No reform is ever inevitable; it is a question of priorities. What they are saying when they say “we can’t afford public higher education” is actually “I don’t believe in public good and don’t want to pay for your education”. It is far from the same thing.
Understanding what policy makers and researchers are saying is a privilege. It is a privilege awarded to the few and there is an inherent responsibility to share this knowledge as far and wide as possible. It is our responsibility to question when people’s lives are reduced to numbers and customers.
Make no mistake, this development is highly ideological and is especially dangerous in countries who still have public systems of education to loose. Even in Finland, policy makers want to start charging tuition fees to students outside the EEA area because they want to “create a market”.
Fighting a battle against commodification as a student representative is an uphill battle on a slippery slope. We all have to take on the responsibility of being critical of the language that we use and are confronted with. If not, we risk finding ourselves in a new financial crisis, this time caused by ballooning student debt instead of subprime mortgages. If that is not bad enough we will also find ourselves in a fundamentally unequal society.
