An Open Letter

Dear institution at which I was 85% certain I would be studying next year,

When you offered me a place last week, your tuition fees for the coming academic year had not yet been finalised. You kindly enclosed the fees from 2008/9 to give me an idea of what I might be expected to cough up and I was reasonably confident that if the money I am expecting to inherit had not come through by then, I could liquidate my savings in anticipation of said funds, pay for the masters and reimburse myself later.

This morning I received a letter advising me of your fees for 2009/10 and I notice you have spontaneously decided to create a separate category for MAs in Anthropology, which means I will be paying £1000 more than if I were studying Linguistics, Music or Small Melanesian Island Studies and approximately £1000 more than I have saved, which I would not have had to do last year.

I will spare you my rant on the failure of the education system to promote social mobility in general and MA funding in particular, but I can sort of, maybe, at a pinch see the justification in charging more for things like Law or Economics which offer a much better return on investment than Gender Studies with Zambian Literature. I can even, at a pinch, see why cinema/media students might be charged more as they probably need to use expensive audio-visual equipment and, well, if I had to pay to insure stuff I was routinely lending to students I'd probably pass on the cost if I could too. I am sure you are, as you claim, 'synonymous with intellectual excitement and academic achievement' and there may, in fact, be an enormous array of employers waiting to entice Anthropology graduates with offers of astronomic salaries and fabulous benefits, but, as a prospective student, I have done a small amount of research into this matter and failed to find evidence that it is anything like as lucrative as, say, Law or Economics.

I will not project any issues about how I should have had the courage to do something funky two years ago instead of rotting in suburbia onto you, nor take out on you my slight annoyance that my parents are willing to pay stupid money for a wedding while adamantly refusing to support me, even morally, in moving into the career I want (gift horses, mouths and all that, not to mention that it means we won't now have to feed our guests baked beans off paper plates just because my MA is costing ££££ more) but, still, YOU SUCK.

Yours sincerely,

She-who-is-furious-yet-grateful-she-is-neither-an-international-student-nor-doing-International-Relations