“Education, education, education”, the mantra that helped to sweep Tony Blair to power in 1997, remains almost as salient today as it did 17 years ago. This idea, that education is the key to both greater prosperity and greater social mobility, has transcended successive governments and has been prominent in British politics for almost half a century. The systematic expansion of higher education has been a significant part of the UK’s dogmatic commitment to endowing ever more young people with higher level academic qualifications. Now George Osborne has embarked on an expansion of this policy, by offering loans of up to £10,000 for postgraduate students undertaking teaching-based, rather than research-focused, degrees.

On the face of it, this seems to be both a fair and politically expedient move. Given the de facto requirement of postgraduate study for an increasing number of jobs, the inability of many poorer students to obtain funding is becoming a substantive barrier to social mobility. Prospective postgraduates have so far found the task of securing loans from the two graduate loans providers, Barclays and The Co-operative, to be an onerous one. Last year for example, fewer than half of all applicants for a government-supported career development loan had their applications approved. The loan scheme proposed by the Chancellor may have some success in addressing this problem. Income-contingent loans operating in a similar fashion to undergraduate loans will enable bright students of all backgrounds to pursue further study.

But can we be sure that providing a loan facility for prospective postgraduates will in fact achieve its ostensible purpose of strengthening the ladders of social mobility? The average cost of a postgraduate degree was £5,680 last year. Factor in living costs and it remains the case that a significant number of potential students will remain incapable of covering the cost of studying for a master’s degree. For students who are unable to access other forms of support, such as scholarships, fee-waivers, or indeed the helping hand of a generous parent, the better, more expensive postgraduate degrees will remain a distant possibility. The benefits of the new loan scheme may accrue to more affluent students, and the problem is likely to be exacerbated by institutions raising tuition fees in response to increased demand. This phenomenon has already been witnessed in the US, where universities have largely captured the benefit of increased financial aid for themselves. The end result is that efforts to promote the affordability of higher education have been somewhat undermined.

The expansion of postgraduate education will not necessarily lead to a better educated and more productive workforce either: superior qualifications on paper should not be conflated with better practical skills. There is concern that postgraduate study will simply become the norm in much the same way that progression to undergraduate study has become the norm for the average school leaver. Nearly 50% go on to university at present, with that proportion increasing virtually year-on-year since the 1960s.

A degree, for many individuals, does not prepare them with the skills that are required in the workplace. Too many bachelor’s degrees have nullified their worth and compromised academic standards, with a significant proportion of graduates still unable to distinguish themselves from their competitors in employment markets. There is a considerable risk that a similar situation will arise with regard to postgraduate degrees; the benchmark for a professional career will simply be raised from a bachelor’s to a master’s degree, with little discernible effect on the skills and productivity of employees.

Offered a loan, many more graduates will undoubtedly leap at the chance to continue their studies for an extra year. Their reasons for doing so may well be spurious in numerous cases, however, with students pursuing postgraduate study because they are yet to decide on a career path, or because they wish to avoid paying off their accumulated student debt for another year. £40,000 in borrowed money will quickly become £50,000, but for students the idea of delaying repayment will hold considerable appeal.

Introduce a postgraduate loan facility, therefore, and you will expand postgraduate education, inevitably leading to a dilution of quality. The focus should be on improving access for poorer students, instead of simply expanding access for everybody. For the brightest students passionate about pursuing further study, the government evidently needs to ensure that it facilitates their engagement with postgraduate study, regardless of their circumstances. But rather than introduce a new loan facility, the government, in collaboration with universities, should review and expand the existing provision of scholarships and fee-waivers, so that more of the best students have access to funding. More needs to be done in order to ensure that there are adequate funding opportunities for less affluent students. Broadening the postgraduate loan system, however, is not the answer.

Low self esteem, anxiety, poor life quality and discontent with body image plague us all to different extents. These can ruin our ability to enjoy our lives. And, according to the claims of some cosmetic surgery practices, these are easily fixable problems. Reasons a healthy person chooses to undergo cosmetic surgery are complex and highly personal, but problems such as these often are cited as reasons for doing so. Scientific studies can even be trotted out to show that plastic surgery can, at least sometimes, make people happier. Even if we disregard the important evidence which acts as a balance to this, hiding behind a screen of scientific claims does not justify promoting cosmetic surgery as a positive “solution”.

Regardless of whether said surgery does improve body image or self-esteem, it sidesteps the reasons why people do this to themselves in the first place. Because we are consistently told both explicitly and implicitly that appearance is what matters, cosmetic surgery seems like the magic solution. Perhaps people do feel better after surgery, because they feel a little closer to fulfilling an absurd concept that we should value ourselves on our appearance, that we need to be “attractive” to get by, and that we should aspire to the totally unrealistic body expectations fed to us by the media.

Cosmetic surgery bypasses the question of why someone might feel unhappy or anxious because of the way they look, offering an imperfect solution to a deep-seated societal problem. Indeed cosmetic surgery is not just an imperfect solution, it actively worsens the state of affairs by suggesting that beauty is a tangible thing to be achieved.

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Instead of cutting ourselves to look more like an idealized, fictional and destructive concept of beauty, we need to value ourselves on more than how we look. If we learn to value ourselves for more stable and non-relative factors, we can feel good about ourselves without surgery. Also, the idea that a standardized ideal of beauty exists is not only a fallacy, but one which is actively promoted by capitalism. It encourages continued purchase of products and procedures which promise to give an end result that can never be achieved; the perfect product strategy.

It is often forgotten that these procedures do carry risk, often quite serious risk. A world which allows healthy people to endanger their lives by essentially disfiguring their bodies in order to conform to an insidious and oppressive beauty ideal is as worrying as it is saddening.

Finally, cosmetic surgery is, simply put, sexist. Although the number of men undergoing cosmetic surgery is on the rise, the majority of patients are still women. This reflects the extreme pressure put on women to “look good”, and the message that the most important thing about a woman is her appearance.

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It is not surprising that patients report better self esteem after surgery in some cases, given the circumstances. Cosmetic surgery is not an empowering solution to the insistence that beauty should and could be achieved. It undermines the idea that people are of worth whatever they look like. This is the case not only because they look great just as they are (since “beauty” is entirely subjective), but primarily because people are more than just their outer shell.

Instead of appeasing our anxieties by butchering ourselves, we need to think about why we continue to value appearance so highly, and still cling to the myth that “beauty” is absolute. This is not a pointless question to be pondered in the pub. People are hurting and endangering themselves because of it. We must fight against the sentiment encapsulated in that famous French proverb that “one must suffer to be beautiful”. We must fight against the idea that one must look a certain way to matter as a human being.

Last Thursday, the Gridiron Club dining society, otherwise known as ‘The Grid’, failed in its attempt to admit women despite a majority voting in favour. Without passing the two-thirds vote threshold needed to change the society’s rules, the club remains exclusively male.

That dining clubs such as the Grid still exist at Oxford University is baffling enough. That gender-segregated clubs still persist is all the more disturbing. At a time when the University and the majority of its students endeavour to shirk the unhelpful view of Oxford as exclusive and elitist, societies such as the Grid only reinforce this false and damaging stereotype.

The realisation by some within the society that their written prohibition of female members threatens to push their organisation into obscurity is telling of that very society’s current irrelevance. To think of the failed vote as a meaningful attempt at modernisation is at best naïve. All it demonstrates is just how out of touch such clubs are with the contemporary Oxford University.

Often criticised for being heavily comprised of alumni of prominent public schools within the UK, dining clubs are backward relics in an increasingly diverse and modern student environment. As two members of the Grid conceded before the vote, the all-male membership of the group is “an anachronism in an Oxford that is advancing”.

Indeed, on arriving at Oxford University, I discovered that these dining societies long immortalised in popular culture are less mysterious and interesting than I originally thought. Groups of male students dressed in awkward clothing descending on restaurants with wine in hand just isn’t as romantic in real life as it is in our imagination.

But even if the clubs are much more bland than we sometimes allow ourselves to think, the folklore surrounding these groups persists. That in itself is enough to taint an outsider’s perception of the University.

There will be those who argue that Oxford University is so full of quirky, out-dated traditions not in keeping with the modern times that to pick on dining clubs seems unfair. If we are going to denounce dining clubs, they say, then we should also denounce matriculation, May Day, subfusc and croquet.

But those traditions are hugely different from the traditional dining clubs existing at Oxford University. Whereas our quirky traditions are non-exclusionary and inert — every student matriculates, has the opportunity to revel on May Day, dress for exams and try their hand at unusual sports — dining clubs are exclusive and deliberately inaccessible to the majority of students.

What is worse, however, than the failure to allow female members into the Grid is the fact that the society thinks female members would want to join in the first place. We have seen recently just how fierce the battle is for the respect and equality of genders within the University. Yet the very foundations of the Gridiron Club that exists today were conceived in a society that devalued and subordinated the role and rights of women.

That dining clubs continue to exist under the same rules, suggests to me that such exclusive groups are on a downwards spiral to irrelevance. It is partially surprising considering it’s 2014 that enough members were ready to vote against the inclusion of women. But to think that women would want to join the society in the first place is, in my opinion, mildly amusing. Societies like the Grid are so far removed from the progress that has been made at this University, and so steeped historically in themes of male-exclusivity, that even if the motion had passed I struggle to imagine there being a strong demand from women for entry.

The typical Oxford student today is, I hope, deeply concerned about access to the University. Getting into Oxford is a tough process riddled with uncertainty (from college selection through to interviews). That you got in and others didn’t is a testament to yourself only if the application process is accessible. For this reason at least, the typical student should care about equality and openness. Attempts to redeem dining clubs by opening their membership to women may technically make them open to a broader array of individuals, but they remain inherently exclusive. That broad exclusivity, let alone the gender restriction, is anathema to modern sentiment at the University.

Dining clubs are a persistent thorn in the side of the ‘modern’ Oxford University. As our University continues to modernise and break down the Oxford stereotype, dining clubs will only fall further and further into obscurity.