2nd December 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
The publication of Lord Browne’s review on universities, particularly the tuition fees that they should be allowed to charge, and the coalition government’s decision to abide by the findings and increase tuition fees for many students across the country, have caused outrage among the UK’s student community. The protests during the last few weeks show that there is a weight of opinion against these decisions, and it appears to be an opinion to which the government isn’t listening.
Objectively, the strength of the protests is difficult to understand. It’s not a new idea to ask university students to pay for their tuition, and the method by which students will pay shouldn’t have a significantly increased financial impact on the rest of their lives compared to the old system. Maybe one of the main issues is that the government hasn’t sufficiently advertised the method to pay back tuition fees, leading to poorer students worrying about how they will pay, maybe the current economic situation of the country is what worries most people, or maybe it’s simply the ideological point of view that education should be provided for free that has angered so many.
It is obviously an unpopular opinion, but one could hope that the increased tuition fees will actually produce the result that many people think is the best way forward. This result is to reduce the number of students attending university, and hopefully mean that a degree becomes as scarce, and consequently, as valuable as it was 20-30 years ago. Why will this happen? Well it’s reasonable to assume that when asked to pay £7,000 a year to be tutored at Oxford or Cambridge, even those students from the poorest backgrounds will still consider that to be a good deal. The potential future earnings that a student can hope for after attending Oxbridge, or any top level university, are much more than the tuition fees that the student will pay. However, this may not be true at some weaker universities, and students may choose to enter the job market aged 18, rather than three years later, with a debt exceeding £20,000, and without a significant increase in their career prospects.
What the government has done is cowardly. Over a number of years they have increased university funding, and encouraged many more students to attend university, without considering whether or not those students ‘should’ be studying an academic course. Consequently, institutions which were formerly called polytechnics, and offered valuable vocational courses, became universities, and offered far weaker courses than they ran before, and weaker in terms of academia than their longer established counter-parts.
Now the government faces a situation where they cannot fund the academic courses at the top universities, and rather than state that, and begin to reduce funding to academically weaker universities, they have appeared to place no university as more important than any other, and simply raised tuition fees across the board.
It’s another example of the government not accepting that life is competitive, and we have to encourage and reward those who deserve it. It is bound to be unpopular among those who want to attend university despite not achieving good A-level grades, but those students should be encouraged to focus on skills that they are good at, not pushed into academia for three years so that the UK’s higher education figures look better.