The news today is that 50,000 children qualified for university wont be able to go because there aren’t sufficient places. This may have been okay except for two things. The government built higher education up as the be all and end all of a successful life and second they turned it into a quasi market by the introduction of fees. Now children are told you can pass the exams an have the money but you still can’t come. Some market that turned out to be. Markets are good for somethings – like eeer books. But bad for others like education. Fees were introduced to force competition between universities and to get undergraduates used to debt, risk and push them towards high earning jobs. It obviously made sense to someone in the boom years – but looks like a very bad idea now.
I think fees were primarily introduced to plug the higher education funding gap. In some ways it’s actually a relief that someone’s taken a decision that there’s a point where there isn’t any more space to just teach more people on the same courses.
I’d almost expected that the New Labour solution to the current problem might be classes of three thousand with lectures in football stadiums and tutorial support provided from call centres.
While I very much support higher education as an option for everyone at some point in life, I think generally many young people would benefit from going out into work and actually learning to do something useful after A-Levels (I did). Now’s not a great time for that either, though.
There may have been a funding gap David and it could have been filled by a graduate tax. Instead it was filled by a form of fees most akin to a market. I was close to the talks when it was set up and over 50 options were looked at. New Labour wanted a quasi market and that is what they got. Now the NUS, Compass and others are pushing for a more progressive alternative that treats under gradtuates as students rather than consumers.