Welcome to my blog. I am a former local journalist who now works in PR and a Conservative and community activist in Woking and Horsell. This blog will keep updated on local issues as well as my interests and quirky news stories.
As a student at the University of Surrey just after Labour came to power, one of the few Labour policies that I supported was the introduction of tuition fees. I sent countless letters to the student newspaper in support and – unsurprisingly – didn’t find much room for my view among the NUS establishment. My point then was that the fee structure as originally proposed exempted many of the less well-off students from paying the fees – but that the abolition of the maintenance grant as part of the tuition fee introduction hit poorer students far harder.
But the NUS didn’t listen to me and since then things have changed hugely, with the cost of a university education now unenviably massive. I cannot think that anyone would found a nation on the principle of leaving young graduates tens of thousands of pounds in debt as a price for their education and it’s utterly bonkers that we’ve got to the stage we have.
Even in 1998, it was obvious to me that there was a pretty simple problem here. The vast majority of young people educated to A-level now wish to attend university – yet the nation simply doesn’t have the funds to allow them to do this and support the swollen university corps needed to deal with the numbers. There are, it logically follows, only two ways to deal with this – to reduce the number of students at university or to increase the amount of money in the system.
Labour’s solution, typically, was to give students money from the future and postpone the resolution of the problem until some unspecified date. Today, David Willetts revealed that even this charade had now run its course and that resolution was now needed. There is no more money left to go in.
It would be great if everybody could have a university education but I have always believed that there are far too many students taking courses that don’t improve their life chances, too many students only at university for social reasons and too many who, even though committed and willing, don’t end up giving the nation back the value of their degrees. Conversely, the amount of money going into serious research in our universities is falling year-on-year. They have become places that cater for drinking and socialising first and research and academia second.
There’s nothing wrong with drinking and socialising - but not when it’s funded by the taxpayer. And if the Lib Dems are not prepared to U-turn and countenance further rises in tuition fees, we all need to do a U-turn and consider once again what the purpose of universities and their facilities is. I believe that there are much more imaginative and worthwhile ways that those facilities can be tied into higher learning without the need of three-year courses. I also think the nation needs to work out how many university places it can afford – and what it wants to use them for – and award that number, not have a show of hands who fancies a spot at uni and then try to squeeze them all in.
Higher education in this country isn’t working, similar to many of the young graduates it produces. It’s time that we had a cultural re-assessment of the role that universities play in our society and lives because the bare fact is that the good times of universal higher education are coming to an end. In future it must be a properly integrated resource available to the most able regardless of background, not a sellable commodity for anyone able to pay (or borrow).
PS I’m not exempting myself from this – I did an undergraduate degree in Music, which was very good and enjoyable. But was it necessary and could it be justified under current economic circumstances? Doubtful.
