The Logic of Loans: students' perceptions of the costs and benefits of the student loan

Government policy towards financial support for students means that students increasingly have to bear the costs of their education, often through acquiring significant student debt. This policy is largely justified with reference to the private benefits (through enhanced life-time earnings) that university graduates can expect to enjoy. Using evidence from a qualitative study of 49 students, this paper analyses the extent to which students are engaged in a process of rational weighing-up of the costs and benefits of higher education as implied by the policy stance. It also explores their interpretation of their financial position and Government policy towards them. It argues that students are very poorly informed about both the costs and benefits of higher education, and that financial outcomes are not created in an essentially private and individual fashion, but instead are strongly mediated by cultural and familial resources.     

Parallel Preachings: Urban II and al-Sulamī

At the Council of Clermont in 1095, Pope Urban II (1088–1099) called for a holy war against the Muslims who had wrested Jerusalem from Christian rule and who continued to threaten the Byzantine Empire. His audience responded enthusiastically and undertook a campaign commonly known today as the first crusade, which established several crusader states in the Levant. Some 10 years after the council, a Damascene jurisprudent named ‘Alīb. Tāhir al-Sulamī (d. 499–500/1106) publicly dictated the earliest extant call for a Muslim counter-offensive against these states. Al-Sulamī's message met with little success, unlike Urban's: only 14 years later, at the Battle of Balat (also called Ager sanguinis or the Field of Blood), do Islamic calls to jihād (holy war) seem to have started to have significant effect. Despite marked disparities between the religious traditions of each faith, the entreaties of Urban II and al-Sulamī parallel one another in many ways. On the most basic level, they have identical purposes: both call for a military campaign against people of another faith. Yet their similarities go much deeper than this. The two preachings reveal a common mindset toward religious or holy war that is all the more striking because Christian views on holy war and Muslim doctrines of jihād developed in isolation. Moreover, both demand similar responses from their listeners – responses that subordinate secular interests to sacred ones. So although these calls to action came out of separate theological traditions and addressed audiences in quite disparate social contexts, their similarities appear to reflect cross-cultural medieval attitudes toward holy war. Indeed, they suggest that there were certain basic ideas associated with holy war that were common to the medieval mindset, regardless of the individual's cultural background.