29th July 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The debate on tuition fees is currently raging more fiercely than ever, with those within the same government not agreeing upon the nature of the change, even before trying to work out the details. An idea that doesn’t seem to have been raised in the debate though, is whether we even know what outcome we want.
The question currently being asked is how do we change the current tuition fee system without discouraging students from attending university, but maybe we should be asking if the problem is that far too many students are attending university. This is obviously a very unpopular debate, and not one which a political party looking for votes is going to start anytime soon.
It’s a very simple idea though, there must be an optimum number of students who we want at universities, and anyone will say that we have to find a balance – it shouldn’t be no-one, and it shouldn’t be everyone. Maybe the idea of not having everyone at university is a more arguable concept, but it only takes a few examples to demonstrate that it must be true: do we want car mechanics, firemen and hairdressers studying a three year academic course? Undergraduate degrees, in their current form, must be available to everyone, but only offered to those with the ability and ambition to study them.
The question is then: if we’re offering fewer university places than students who want to take them, how do we decide how many to offer, and who to award them to? A simple economic argument says that the value of the skills imparted during someone’s course must be greater than the cost of providing the course. If this were the case for all university places then the debate wouldn’t exist, the trouble is that some courses simply aren’t contributing the value of the funding they receive, but still dilute funding for those courses that do so.
So, the question shouldn’t be: how do we change tuition fees to resolve the government’s and universities’ deficit problem? But: how do we better structure higher education to increase the value in those completing it? Tackling the problem from an economic policy point of view is completely missing the cause of the problem.