The political economy of the coefficient policy

Everyone knows that the real purpose of the coefficient policy has to do neither with regulating vocational high schools nor with maintaining a certain level in education. Whatever justification or argument those who want the policy to continue exactly as it is put forward, in the back of their minds there is no field of struggle other than the Imam-Hatip high schools. Consequently, the details gone into in debates on the pedagogical functions of the coefficient policy serve no purpose other than to conceal the real intentions further.

Even so, the thought that the aim of the coefficient policy is only to block the way of the İHLs, and that other vocational high schools are victims who got caught in the crossfire, does not seem very accurate when the system is examined as a whole. On the contrary, it is far clearer that the system targets all vocational high schools in the first degree, no less than the İHLs. Indeed, with the secondary education achievement score also brought into the ÖSS score calculation, it is seen that not only vocational high schools but also graduates of provincial or peripheral schools are targeted.

The idea of adding the average achievement of the school a person graduated from to his individual achievement is a thoroughly devilish idea, and it does not target vocational high school students alone. Frankly, the system, which has been applied for 11 years, bears all the traces of a mentality based on class discrimination.

It is frequently claimed that vocational high schools, competing under equal conditions with general high school students, come into a more advantageous position because of their vocational training, and that this additional advantage can be overcome only by putting the coefficient obstacle in front of vocational high schools. It is very clear that those who voice this do not know the details of the coefficient system. First of all, vocational training received in high school (since it is not supported by secondary education) is of no use whatsoever in the market (to understand this it is enough to listen to one or two master craftsmen at the industrial estates). Moreover, graduates of vocational high schools cannot advance in their own field by choosing an engineering degree. That is, the vocational high school student is made to pay the price of studying at a vocational high school by being told "what use is this to you!"

On the other hand, this matter evidently rests on the logic of assuming that educational resources are very scarce and so allocating these resources as far as possible to one's own ideological supporters while excluding "the others" from them.

Frankly, this severe discrimination works only in an environment where the number of universities is very small. Yet if the former YÖK administration or the governments had spent all their energy on increasing this resource instead of on depriving some of it, they could have created enough educational opportunity for the students they excluded as well. In that case, at the very least, there would have been no room for any concern based on educational inequality between vocational high school and general high school students; for there would have been educational opportunity enough for everyone. Yet not the slightest effort was made toward increasing higher education capacity, because the aim was not for everyone to receive education as far as possible but, on the contrary, to preserve the class-based structure of society by keeping the educational opportunity, which is a means of class mobility, open only to certain segments.

That is why, let us recall, under the Gürüz and Teziç YÖK administrations, besides the stubborn insistence on the coefficient policy, one of the most important sensitivities was displayed against the opening of new universities. Using quality as a pretext regarding newly opened universities, they ignored the hopes piled up at the gates of universities. Although the ratio in medicine had reached super-luxury levels with only 3.8 students per instructor, they senselessly resisted increasing quotas.

In the face of these data, it is, in a single word, a scandal that some leftists from whom we expect a class sensitivity, especially the circles of Eğitim-Sen, ignore all these class dimensions of the coefficient policy and meet the event along the İHL line. This is a tragic example of an economic-political outlook falling victim to ideological blindness.

Last year, YÖK saw through a simple study that university quotas could be increased by 25 percent without the need for any additional structuring, and it increased them. Afterwards, with new practices and newly opened universities, the goal of a level at which no one who wants to study at a university and cannot will be left behind has begun to be seen on the horizon.

Thus it has been seen that an education policy not based on a class-based structure resting on the exclusion of some can be carried out. What is interesting here is that, instead of a notion of competition that consumes everyone, concerned and unconcerned, a politics that offers an environment of sharing sufficient for everyone by enlarging the pie has increasingly begun to be seen as possible.

We need to begin by giving up seeing the field of education as a zero-sum field, that is, as a field where when one loses the other gains, and when one gains the other gains.

Today, when vocational high schools win, general high schools do not lose. On the contrary, it has been clearly seen that a system developed to deprive one side makes everyone a victim. Yet it is quite possible to develop, with an approach that embraces everyone, a system in which every segment of society wins.